


always stuck and running

by wakeupnew



Series: Clone Wars campaign [6]
Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Post-Order 66
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-05
Updated: 2020-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:26:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22126336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wakeupnew/pseuds/wakeupnew
Summary: Boomer had never given a second thought to Knight Tai’s fate. They’d been grimly satisfied to know that Bash had shot their Jedi in the head. Boomer’s one and only regret was that they hadn’t killed her sooner.It’s not right. Even if she had been a traitor, they should have felt something.After attacking their Jedi on Selvaris, a clone trooper slowly begins to wake up.
Series: Clone Wars campaign [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1592614
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So my tabletop group finished our Clone Wars campaign and we had a lot of feelings after our final session ended on Order 66. Somehow (and we were shocked by this) most of our characters survived it, with one notable exception, but we all wanted to know what happened to them afterward. This is my take on the post-Order 66 path for my character. Title from "Sign of the Times" by Harry Styles.
> 
> [ryfkah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryfkah), [sandrylene](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sandrylene), [varadia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/varadia), and [genarti](https://archiveofourown.org/users/genarti) were the finest of clone siblings, and our incredible GM [jothra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jothra) was Captain Leeadra Rennick, Knight Iluna Tai, and everyone else. A big thank you to them all for being the single best and most supportive tabletop group a clone could wish for (and also sorry for this giant wall of sadness), and to [jothra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jothra) and [varadia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/varadia) in particular for looking over my dialogue for their characters here. [Character primer and art for the campaign](https://wakeupnew.tumblr.com/post/190072369169/so-my-tabletop-group-played-a-clone-wars-campaign). 
> 
> As a heads up, a nonbinary character is briefly intentionally misgendered (by assholes) in the first part of this fic.

The new troops look impossibly young. 

Even now, they’re technically all a few years older than Boomer, who’s 14 and has never felt more wizened. A bunch of farmboys and one farmgirl — and no one who’s presented themself any other way, publicly or privately, since Boomer matter-of-factly introduced themself — in their late teens, recruited from sleepy Outer Rim worlds and transported to join the new Imperial academy on Antar. 

They stand in a loose semi-circle around Boomer, arcs of pristine white armor in a long, bare white room. Most are still shifting uncomfortably under the weight of their new armor. Only a handful of them are actively standing at attention. One has tilted his helmet back and may be asleep under it. 

Boomer can make guesses, but has no way of determining for sure who’s actually paying attention as they demonstrate the proper way to break down and rebuild a standard-issue blaster rifle. Clone trooper discipline, this is not.

Several of the other trainers would be screaming in the recruits’ faces, by this point. Some of them already are, with their own squad groups scattered across the enormous hall.

Boomer sets the blaster rifle on the table and lifts their own helmet off. Their squad of 12 troopers all start. “Buckets off, let’s go.”

“Sir,” says one of the trainees urgently, as some of the others start taking off their helmets and blinking against the harsh artificial light, “the drill sergeants when we arrived said—” 

It’s TK-287 again. His cohort has been on-planet for two days and already, Boomer can tell that one’s going to be trouble.

“To follow the orders of your commanding officer. Thank you for that timely reminder, trooper,” says Boomer, smiling.

“...Yes, sir,” says the trooper, and he removes his helmet. His blond hair is matted to his head with sweat. No wonder he’s so crabby. 

“Who’s handled a blaster before?” Boomer asks. The pack of them look at each other. “Go on, hands up.” Hesitantly, most hands go up. “Who’s done it under pressure, with your life on the line?”

Only one recruit’s hand stays up. Boomer takes one look at her stony expression and believes her. They motion for her to put her hand down. It’s an honest bunch — they’ve all got that going for them.

“By the time we’re done here, you’ll be able to reassemble and load this rifle in ten seconds with your eyes shut,” Boomer says. 

A few boots shuffle. In the back of the group, there’s a mutter: “This again?” 

“Your blaster is your first and best tool,” Boomer says, shooting a knowing look at the two troopers standing in the back. TK-287 and his shadow both shut their mouths. “You need to know exactly how it works, and you need be able to do this in the dark, waking up out of a dead sleep, injured, or panicked. It’ll become muscle memory. No matter what, your hands will remember what to do. That’s going to save you.

“So,” says Boomer, and they hold up the blaster rifle stock in one hand and the barrel in the other. “What’s the first step?”

+

When the troops are holstering their blasters and picking up their helmets, rubbing at sore hands, the one woman in Boomer’s group approaches them. “Sarge?” she asks. It’s a smart compromise between their introduction of themself as Sergeant Boomer, and their CO’s introduction of them as Sergeant 2726. This one’s definitely the sharpest of this particular bunch of recruits.

“Permission to speak freely?”

“Granted,” says Boomer, turning to give her their full attention. 

“You’re not like the other trainers,” she says. It’s not feedback Boomer is particularly surprised to hear, though they are surprised to hear it stated so baldly by a recruit. 

Boomer lifts their eyebrows rather than quipping anything about their panache. They do have a grasp of military discipline.

She lowers her voice even further. “Are you a clone?”

That … is not what Boomer was expecting to hear.

“Yes,” they say. 

“Were you in the war?”

“I was,” they say. 

Her face has gone flinty again. “Did you kill Jedi?”

“My squad did,” Boomer says easily. 

“Good,” says 266, grimly satisfied, and she salutes Boomer and moves off with her blaster and her helmet.

“I told you he is,” someone is saying. Other recruits were listening to that conversation too, Boomer belatedly realizes. They’re a pack of gossip monsters. To his buddy, 287 says, “I told you, he looks just like 3902 with his helmet off. Both of them are kriffing clones.”

Does the kid think they’re deaf without their helmet? Boomer has some hearing loss in their left ear, thanks to the same explosion that permanently singed a chunk off that eyebrow, but they can hear 287 loud and clear.

287 makes eye contact with Boomer over another trooper’s head. 

No, he knows he can be heard. 

Boomer calls, “287.” They whistle and beckon to him. The recruit moves toward them, through the crowd of his departing squadmates, without any hint of reluctance. He really doesn’t have any self-preservation instinct whatsoever. 

“Attention,” says Boomer, still smiling, and the recruit looks like he’s unsure of what to do for a split second, and then he jerks to attention. His face is neutral but there’s still a hint of smugness about the set of his mouth.

“I know,” they say affably, “you think I can be messed with.” They smile at him. “I’d reconsider.”

They see the first hint of unease on TK-287’s face. He nods, because he isn’t entirely a fool.

“What’s my name? How will you refer to me?”

“As they, Sergeant Boomer, sir,” says 287, low.

“Good,” says Boomer lightly, and they step back and wave him off. “Dismissed.”

These recruits have no discipline, Boomer thinks, as they watch 287 jog after his classmates. They’re just a bunch of kids who were eager to pick up a blaster. 

Carida’s Academy has existed in some form for millennia. It spent the last several years training foot soldiers for the Republic and now it’s moved on to elite stormtroopers. It’s legendarily brutal; most hopefuls will never even make it through its storied doors and many will wash out, though with the sheer number of recruits on-planet, that won’t make a difference to the glory of the Empire. 

Carida is for the best of the best. It will be training stormtrooper officers and commandos.

Someone, though, has to train the non-elite. 

Hundreds of small military academies like Boomer’s (relatively) new homebase are cropping up across the galaxy. Antar’s academy is being built up around the new recruits; the superintendent and leadership are creating a curriculum and a training regimen on the fly. It’s not ideal, but they’ll make it work.

Boomer reassembles their own rifle in a handful of swift, sure movements, and holsters it.

“Sergeant,” says a voice from behind them, and they turn to find Commander Grey approaching from across the hall, hands clasped behind his back. He’s a tall, leonine man going prematurely gray (appropriately enough). Boomer has had relatively little direct interaction with him but right from the start, they’ve thought the superintendent of the academy moves like a predator, steps slow and measured. His legs are long enough that Boomer’s commanding officer, Major Vinepiers, is double-timing to keep up.

Boomer snaps to attention and says, “Sir!”

“At ease,” says Commander Grey, stopping in front of Boomer. Up close, he’s impossibly tall for a human, and stoop-shouldered. “I was glad to see you taking a hard line with that recruit. Only strict discipline will toughen them into a fighting force fit for the Emperor.”

“Yes, sir,” says Boomer, because Commander Gray almost definitely couldn’t hear what he and TK-287 were actually saying.

“You aren’t here to be their friend, 2726,” says Vinepiers. It’s a familiar line, and it’s clear, now, who orchestrated this visit from the commander.

“No, sir,” says Boomer genially. “I’m here to train them for success in the field.”

Vinepiers narrows his eyes at them, but Commander Grey nods, calm and approving. “Too right,” he says. “For the glory of the Empire. Carry on, Sergeant. Dismissed.”

Boomer salutes and makes their exit. 

Major Vinepiers has made it perfectly clear that he disapproves of Boomer and their methods, but up until now, he seemed content to bark orders and mollified by salutes, army discipline, and Boomer affably sliding out of conversations. Jumping straight over Vinepiers’ own commanding officer to involve the academy’s superintendent — well, that probably qualifies as an escalation. 

Boomer walks back toward the barracks. The academy was cobbled together out of a cluster of low-slung buildings in the southern jungles of Antar. As far as Boomer can tell, the complex was some kind of neglected Gotal boarding school before it was commandeered to train stormtroopers and pilots. 

Boomer always absently catalogues architectural weaknesses as they move through a structure, but this has more than most; there are entire sections of the complex where tree roots have broken through the floors. Boomer arrived at the end of a frenzied month of construction. The base still feels as though it could fall down around their ears and be reclaimed by the jungle at any moment, but it’s able to house 5,000 recruits and staff and it even has a small hangar bay now.

They glance down and just barely avoid stepping in a pile of what looks to be druun scat. The local wildlife has still been finding its way inside, and it does not appreciate their presence. Boomer knows someone who’d be— 

The galley doors open, releasing the general roar of hundreds of hungry recruits into the corridor, and a particularly familiar face emerges.

“Just the man I was looking for!” says Boomer, jogging to catch up to CT-3902. “Headed my way?”

The other clone trooper grimaces, helmet tucked under his arm. “If you’re going back to barracks, yes. Obviously.”

There are a handful of other clones on-base, but Corporal 3902 is the only one in Boomer’s garrison. So far, he has proved to be remarkably humorless and hasn’t given up any personal information other than that he was a comms officer during the war, but Boomer’s on the case.

3902 is glancing to the side, away from Boomer, as they walk. There’s nothing to look at but white walls and the occasional persistent vine, since the corridors are empty while most of the base eats dinner, so it’s almost certainly an avoidance tactic, Boomer notes with some amusement. 

“So,” says Boomer, “what’s your name?”

The other trooper sends them a look that he clearly wants to be quelling. “3902.”

Boomer makes a cheerful buzzing noise. “You know what I mean.”

“Yes, because you won’t stop asking,” says 3902 shortly. “The major wants the garrison to answer to our identifying codes. You should, too.”

“I do,” they say easily. “I just have another option. So do you.”

CT-3902 mutters something rude-sounding under his breath, which Boomer optimistically counts as a step forward. 

“Look. It’s just you and me,” Boomer points out, which is, of course, when a recruit turns the corner, clocks the two of them with identical faces, and visibly double-takes before belatedly saluting as he passes.

Boomer tosses the recruit a lazy salute — answer lax military discipline with lax military discipline alike — and finds 3902’s mouth set in a thin line. 

“I’m following orders,” 3902 says, as he shoves his helmet back on. It’s not much of an excuse. If he was concerned with actual military discipline, he wouldn’t be talking to Boomer the way he is; not as a corporal to Boomer’s sergeant. “Was there something else you wanted?”

“Well,” says Boomer, “there was one thing; I’m glad you asked. About comms access.”

“No,” says 3902.

“I just need to send a few quick messages, and then I’ll be right out of your hair.”

“2726—”

“It’s Boomer,” Boomer says, for what has to be the fiftieth time this week.

“—I can’t allow unauthorized comms use.”

“Does anyone here authorize your logs?” they ask, pointing down as they step over a tree root, to illustrate their point. “It can’t be high on anybody’s priority list.” Boomer will eat their helmet if anyone in this administration is monitoring regular comms.

“You know the kind of trouble I could get into for something like that,” says 3902.

“It’ll be fine. I’ll take the hit if it goes wrong.”

3902 gives an aggravated hiss. “What’s worth that?” 

“I made a promise,” Boomer says. “I wasn’t counting on comms access to go the way it went.” 

It hadn’t always been easy to stay in touch, under the Republic. Boomer, as members of their very first squad were once happy to remind them, was bad at it. The GAR didn’t usually assume that clone troopers required access to long-range comms for personal reasons. Everyone they knew in the galaxy tended to be right there, on the frontlines, with them. But you could make it happen easily enough if you knew the right person, and in all but the units with the strictest, most by-the-book commanding officers, it wasn’t frowned upon. 

Communicating with the rest of the galaxy was easier in Boomer’s final squad than any other assignment they’d previously had. The traitor Tai lulled them all into complacency with perks like comms access. Boomer doesn’t miss that.

But it is indisputably more difficult to communicate for personal reasons, now. The recruits aren’t allowed to talk to anyone outside the base while they’re in training, and Major Vinepiers has made it clear that the trainers are expected to put all their energy into being loyal scions of the Empire. 

Eventually, Boomer thinks, somebody’s going to procure a personal comm unit and do brisk business in black market communications, but for now, there’s one option.

“I just want to check in on my old squad,” Boomer says. “I worry about them.” Something had clearly been eating Target on the medical frigate where they’d recovered from their injuries after the battle with the traitor, continuing into their last deployment together as security on a base. Boomer hadn’t been able to get it out of him before they’d been reassigned separately, and they can’t stop thinking about where Target’s ended up and how he’s fitting in with his new squad. 

Bash, they’re a little less immediately concerned about, but they haven’t seen him since Selvaris. Plus he no longer has H1-F1 to serve as his hands. They want to know where he is and how he’s doing. They think once they settle in more on Antar, they can probably figure out how to scrounge some recording equipment for him. 

3902 sighs. “Is that really all?”

“I’ll make it worth your while, of course,” Boomer says. “Fair’s fair.”

His helmet tilts, ever so slightly, toward Boomer. “What did you have in mind?”

“What do you want?” Boomer counters. “Holonovels? Illicit snacks?” 

When 3902 pauses, Boomer knows they have him. 

Apparently what he wants is for someone to do his spare part inventory for him (Boomer has a deep affinity for datawork and organizational systems and is very sold), and black market Ithorian caf. Boomer has no idea where a clone trooper corporal managed to get a taste for the good stuff, but Boomer used to be able to get their hands on all kinds of items that were technically contraband. Things can’t have changed so much that they can’t work it out. 

The two of them shake on it, just outside the door to the trainers’ barracks. 

“Access on my schedule, 2726, not yours,” 3902 warns again. “Ten minutes, that’s it. I’ll tell you when.”

“Thanks,” says Boomer, smiling. “It’s still Boomer. But you’re really helping me out.”

“Just get that caf,” says 3902 darkly. “Wait for a minute before you come in.” He abandons them out in the corridor. 

Boy, he really doesn’t want to be associated with Boomer. Bemused, Boomer casually leans against the wall to wait. 

All at once, they aren’t alone anymore. There’s something touching their mind; a tap on the virtual shoulder, a presence that shouldn’t be there. The feeling of ALIVE and a query and—

With a cold rush of adrenaline, Boomer says, “No,” jerks upright, and punches the keypad to open the barracks door.

Inside, 3902 is methodically stowing his armor in his locker, his back to the door. TK-7773 is sitting cross-legged on his bunk, surrounded by all the disparate pieces of his armor. He gives Boomer a strange look over the boot he’s polishing. “Who’re you talking to?”

“No one,” says Boomer.

* * *

True to his word, CT-3902 follows his own schedule. It’s nearly a week before, over a pre-dawn meal in the mess, he catches Boomer’s eye from down the table and makes significant eyes. 

Boomer lifts their eyebrows and points at themself with their fork, mouthing, ‘Me?’ and 3902 narrows his eyes furiously.

Boomer considers leaning around the trooper between them and asking 3902 if he has something in his eye, but instead they laugh and give him a nod. No sense in causing an aneurism. 

3802’s personal philosophy is all too obvious: fit in at all costs. Make them forget he’s a clone trooper.

The other trainers and officers, and the recruits too, won’t forget it. Many aren’t subtle about seeing the clones as obsolete remnants of an inglorious past; as on their way out. Boomer can’t deny that they feel the aches and pains of the day more acutely than they did as a fresh recruit. They’ve got a knee that goes stiff in high humidity, which makes every morning on this jungle planet a comedy of errors until they move around enough to loosen it up. But they’ve got plenty of fight left in them. They know who they are. 

3902 cares too much about what other people think. 

In the press of bodies in identical armor as the mess clears out, trainers on the way to give their recruits a rude awakening — surprise dawn fitness sessions are in their future — Boomer sidles up alongside 3902.

“You rang?” they ask.

“0500 hours, comms closet,” says 3902 shortly, and he switches helmet frequencies with an audible click and steps away.

+

Boomer announces themself to their recruits by kicking open the antique barracks door and bellowing, “Rise and shine, kids!”

Two recruits leap straight out of their bunks. One trips over himself and immediately eats dirt. One lone recruit was already awake and doing push-ups — that’s TK-266, still at the top of her class — and rises swiftly to her feet. There are two squads packed into this set of barracks, and among the remaining recruits, there are various stages of flailing, getting trapped in blankets, remaining asleep (which is honestly impressive — Boomer’s voice projects even at their normal speaking volume), and groaning with pillows yanked over their heads.

Sergeant TK-7298 comes in behind them and, seeing the scene, barks, “Report!” 

The recruits scramble, rolling out of bed and diving for equipment and hopping into their armor. 266 is light years ahead of the rest, standing at attention in full armor in front of her neatly made bunk, in short order. The rest of the two squads catch up eventually, many of them bleary-eyed and clearly still half asleep. 

7298 lets them have it. “You call that discipline?” he roars. “You’re all a disgrace to the name of the Emperor!” 

He continues on in that vein.

Boomer and their siblings had known better from the time they were very young. There never would have been a bed check this shambolic on Kamino; not even from the youngest clones. It’s a disaster, but Boomer is struggling not to laugh at it. A member of 7298’s squad is wearing his gauntlets on the wrong hands. Boomer doesn’t know how that was even possible.

“Move out!” 7298 shouts, chopping his hand at the door, and his squad obeys with alacrity.

Boomer’s, they realize, is looking to them. “You heard the sergeant,” they say, jerking their head at the door, and the squad scrambles after their fellow recruits. It’s 7298’s turn to oversee the bed check and fitness session for their two squads, so Boomer doesn’t follow after them.

“Thanks for the assist,” 7298 bites, sarcasm evident even through his helmet comm, and he turns on his heel and doesn’t wait for Boomer’s response.

+

In the comms closet an hour later, 3902 is clearly having misgivings.

“No more than three receivers,” he says, pacing to the other side of the closet as Boomer seats themself in front of the equipment. “This unit can’t get tagged for sending junk.”

“I only need to reach three troopers,” Boomer says, spreading their hands wide, “so that’s perfect.” They pull up the display, and key in Bash’s batch number followed by his ID code: 3313.

Boomer glances over their shoulder at 3902, who is still hovering. “Want to say hi?” they offer.

“What? No,” says 3902, straightening up all at once, like it hadn’t occurred to him that if he stays in this small closet, he’s going to be part of all of Boomer’s communications. “No. I will be back.” He points emphatically at Boomer as he pauses in the doorway. “In ten minutes. That’s it.”

“As agreed,” says Boomer, crisply saluting him, and 3902 makes an exasperated noise and barrels out the door.

Boomer smiles to themself and hits the initiation code to reach Bash. 

The display immediately lights up with a red message outlined in an equally ominous red box: UNDELIVERABLE. 

Boomer frowns. They don’t have an exact comm code for Bash; they don’t have one for anyone. Troopers don’t have them. (They got someone’s code, recently. Months ago. Someone draped in a purple scarf slyly slipped it to them and said—) 

But entering clone troopers’ batch and designation numbers should be sufficient to send a message that will sit in a trooper’s account until they devise a method of checking it. Some CO’s are more permissive than others; Bash’s apparently doesn’t care what he sends. Boomer’s honestly surprised that they didn’t log in to find their account swamped with innocuous short messages from Bash. 

Boomer selects the chyron for more information, and stops dead.

Bash’s file is topped by a handful of Aurebesh characters.

STATUS: DESERTER.

That can’t be right. 

Boomer scans quickly but most of Bash’s publicly available file has been scrubbed. 

They sit at the station. The screen still shows those stark words. They don’t resolve into something that makes sense. Bash had his eccentricities when they served together, but he was a loyal soldier. He wouldn’t quit his duties and abandon his brothers to—

His brothers.

Boomer swiftly goes back to the main screen. They enter Target’s batch number and identification code.

UNDELIVERABLE.

Target’s file is different. The information is still there — deployments, commendations, the story of three years of blood and sweat and laughter and learning cut down to the barest details.

There’s a tag at the top of the file.

STATUS: MISSING IN ACTION. PRESUMED KILLED IN ACTION.

Boomer’s heartbeat thunders in their ears. 

There’s no further information in the file. There’s nothing about Target, about an occasionally-cynical, always thoughtful and curious, easily embarrassed trooper with a gift for meditation, who faced down 60 battle-mad clone troopers with a rifle and a complete unwillingness to retreat. 

According to his list of assignments, he was last stationed in the capital city of a world that Boomer immediately recognizes as the site of an enormous, coordinated terrorist incursion. An attack large enough that news of it even reached Boomer, here on the outer edge of nowhere.

Boomer puts their head down and digs the heels of their hands into their eyes.

They’re still sitting like that when the pneumatic door hisses open.

“Time’s up,” 3902 is announcing grimly. “It’s past up; it’s—” He stops. His footsteps stop.

Boomer doesn’t say anything.

“You done?” 3902 asks, finally.

“Five more minutes,” says Boomer.

“...Yeah,” says 3902. “Sure.”

His heavy footsteps hesitate for a moment, and then he steps out the door.

There’s a missing space they ought to reach out for. A third name, inextricably connected to Bash and Target.

Boomer lifts their head. They pause.

They enter Struts’ identifying code into the comm unit.

Immediately, it’s recording. There’s no undeliverable error.

Boomer takes a deep breath, and smiles. “Hi,” they say to the recording unit. “Did you miss me?”

+

When they open the door, 3902 is waiting in the corridor, leaning against the bulkhead with his foot propped up behind him. For once, he has his helmet tucked under his arm instead of hiding his face. 

“Hey,” he says, looking up. He’s frowning. “2726.”

“Thanks,” says Boomer. “I’ll get you that caf.”

They put on their helmet and leave 3902 behind.

Boomer’s feet carry them outside to the ballistics testing grounds. It’s a wide-open space, razed of trees and undergrowth, pitted and cratered from past explosions with thick tangles of purple vines already starting to grow back again. There’s a three-meter-thick transparisteel wall, blown black from old smoke, shielding the main campus from any particularly large mishaps. 

It’s deserted; it’s too early in this group of recruits’ training for this. Boomer doesn’t trust them not to accidentally kneecap themselves with their standard-issue blaster rifles. They’re not getting near heavy ordinance anytime soon. They can’t be trusted yet. Not the way Target always could be, right from his earliest, shiniest days.

Boomer stands fully armored from head to toe in the clearing that the jungle is trying to take back. They pull off their helmet and are immediately smothered by humidity; the thick air and the sounds of strange creatures crying out in the distance. 

They let themself sag against the transparisteel barrier. 

The Jedi took everything. Cog is dead; the traitor Knight Tai killed him. In all likelihood, Target has been blown into constituent atoms. Bash and — No, only Bash. Bash is scattered to the winds; a deserter. If Boomer had been able to keep them all together; if they had pushed harder to keep Target with them—

It wouldn’t have gotten them anywhere, they know. There’s no interest in the unit cohesion of clone troopers.

Boomer’s hand tightens on the edge of their helmet, and, all at once, they violently pitch it into the undergrowth. From the telltale _thok!_ , it probably hammered into a tree, which they’re going to have to answer for, later. Major Vinepiers is a stickler for the aesthetic quality of his troops’ armor.

There’s an alien, all too familiar feeling, then, of ALIVE; of TARGET and BASH and ALIVE, of—

Boomer’s head hurts. “Stop,” they say.

They used to know how to do this without speaking out loud. There was a time when they practiced, when— But those were lessons delivered by the traitor. They can’t be trusted.

The feeling stubbornly persists: ALIVE.

Their heart is racing. They can’t be trusted. 

“ _Get out_ ,” they shout, imagining a violent shove away, an explosion; their voice rising enough that a startled flock of druun takes flight.

And then they’re alone with the distant sound of beating wings.

* * *

Marksmanship is next on the curriculum. 

With few exceptions, the recruits are truly terrible shots.

They teach the recruits the beginnings of order and discipline. When to salute, how to address commanding officers. The importance of accurate documentation.

Things that make sense. Things that always made sense.

* * *

“And that’s how a third of my recruits ended up in the medbay,” says TK-5843 with disgust, to a chorus of groans and laughter around the room. 

The barracks are a hive of activity at this hour of the morning, trainers filtering in from the sonic showers, efficiently making up their bunks, or strapping their armor on. A few are shaving their faces or clipping their hair. Though they’ll have their helmets on for the majority of the day ahead, there are strict grooming regulations.

Boomer’s long hair got buzzed short again months ago, while they were unconscious during yet another stint in a medical bay after a rough deployment; before they arrived on Antar and after they lost Target. They smother the thought.

“They’re never going to learn,” says TK-7773, shaking his head.

“They’ll learn or they’ll die,” says TK-7298 baldly.

Boomer’s at their footlocker at the foot of their bunk, getting dressed. Their black undersuit fits them like a second skin. As they’re pulling it up their body, they notice they’re receiving a long glance from TK-7773, who’s sat down on the bunk beside theirs to adjust his boots.

Boomer winks at 7773 and says, “See something you like?”

He laughs. “That scar’s a beauty, mate.”

Boomer has plenty of them, but they know what he’s looking at: the stab wound burned through the meat of their shoulder, front and back, and the big one — a long, raised red slash across their chest. Souvenirs from burning down the traitor.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” puts in another corporal, whistling. “Clone in the 423rd has a wicked one too. Jedi scum practically cut him in half.”

Lightsaber scars are a badge of honor among clone troopers; a mark of success, a dead traitor. The sheer bloody-minded stubbornness of surviving a Jedi’s last stand. 

“Hey now,” objects Boomer genially, “I’m accepting compliments, here,” to a snort of laughter from 7773. 

“Cut the chatter, would you?” complains 7298 irritably.

Boomer glances around for CT-3902’s patented sour face at the exchange, but there’s no sign of him amid the morning’s organized chaos. They seal their bodysuit, making minute adjustments to the elbows and knees, and quickly armor up. Their white armor gleams, black joints still factory-stiff. 

They wait until they’re headed to the galley before falling into step alongside TK-7773, who’s been among the friendliest of the teachers and is a sure source of gossip.

“Are we light on trainers this morning?” they ask.

“Major called CT-3902 to report, a while ago,” says 7773, shrugging. “Haven’t seen him since.”

That’s … unusual.

+

It becomes regrettably clear when Major Vinepiers appears in the door of the mess. 

The troopers nearest the door practically kick their table over in their haste to rise and salute, and the rest of the tables swiftly fall silent and follow suit with slightly more dignity.

“CT-2726!” Major Vinepiers barks, glaring across the sea of white armor. “Report!”

Boomer abandons their tray and the curious stare that TK-7773 turns on them — news of this incident will be across the entire garrison in less than an hour, most likely — and double-times it across the mess floor, where they salute the major.

“Reporting as ordered, sir,” they say.

“My office, now,” snaps Major Vinepiers, and Boomer falls in behind him as he storms out of the mess.

In the corridor, a lone trooper passes. From their instantly-familiar carriage, they’re a clone.

From the rank insignia and the long, judgmental stare the helmet delivers as the clone trooper marches past, it’s 3902. 

Boomer has been rumbled. 

They’ve never set foot in the major’s office before. It turns out to be a gray, windowless space tucked deep in the bowels of the academy. There’s a desk with a single chair behind it. Hovering over the desk, a holo awaits — a human officer dressed in nondescript Fleet gray, visible from the waist up, with the rank insignia of a lieutenant.

“You,” Major Vinepiers barks at Boomer. He points to a spot on the floor. “Here, now! Helmet off. You will answer all of her questions, immediately and truthfully.”

“Yes sir,” says Boomer, removing their helmet and stepping into full attention on the spot indicated, helmet under their arm.

“Lieutenant,” says Major Vinepiers, dropping into the chair behind his desk and ceding the floor with bad grace.

“CT-2726,” says the stranger over the holo unit. She’s a striking human woman, pale and likely tall, with hooded eyes and close-cropped red hair. “I’m Lieutenant Nyeaddi. I’m a loyalty officer. Are you familiar with our purview?”

Boomer has heard only faint rumblings about loyalty officers, and only in recent days. They’re supposed to be shadowy and secretive, the long fingers of the Emperor in ferreting out disloyalty. They’re supposedly ruthless and possessed of an entirely open mandate — carte blanche to do whatever’s necessary to discover the truth. 

Boomer had thought they were an ominous tall tale to frighten young recruits into eating their rations and keeping their armor oiled. 

Boomer thought they had maintained a neutral expression, but the officer nods with satisfaction at whatever she sees in their face. “Good,” she says. “I prefer fewer explanations. So we’ll jump straight to the chase, then.”

“Yes, sir,” they say.

“Three standard days ago, you attempted to contact a known deserter.” Nyeaddi glances down at something out of the view of the holo unit. “You then attempted to reach a suspected deserter.”

Boomer’s heart thumps. ALIVE, they half-remember. TARGET, BASH, ALIVE.

The lieutenant has paused and is giving them an expectant look.

“I was trying to speak to the two surviving members of my former squad, sir,” Boomer says slowly, squashing that memory. “I was the senior officer. I still feel responsible for their…” ‘Well-being’ isn’t going to cut it, with this audience. “Their optimization as soldiers.”

“In the process, you made unauthorized use of Imperial equipment,” says Nyeaddi.

“I apologize for my misappropriation of resources, sir. The station was unattended,” Boomer says. It’s true, in a certain sense, and it’s the best they can do for 3902 on short notice. They have to hope 3902 told her something similar.

For the first time, Nyeaddi shows an emotion other than brisk. She almost looks … amused. It is a deeply unpleasant and unsettling expression on her face. “I suppose you’ll tell me you were unaware of the status of both CT-3313 and CT-4090.”

“I was, sir,” they say, focused just over her blue-tinted left shoulder. “I was shocked.”

“Look at me when you address me, trooper,” she says, and Boomer does. She studies their face for a moment, then nods to herself, glancing down again, presumably to check her notes. “And then you deposited a message for CT-2738. I’ll be interviewing him as well.” She delivers the statement matter-of-fairly, but there’s veiled menace in it.

Shavit. Now Struts is in for it, too, and trying to warn him will only make it worse.

“Why did you contact 2738?” she asks.

“He was in my batch on Kamino and my first squad, sir. I had access to a comm unit, so I took the opportunity to check in.”

She’s undoubtedly already viewed that message. It had been short; Boomer pointing out that they’re making an effort and Struts can’t make fun of them anymore for being bad at staying in touch. Asking how he’s doing. They’d been shaken by the discovery of Bash and Target’s files. They know they hadn’t been themself.

“Hm,” says the lieutenant flatly, and she leans in close, her face filling more of the holo projection. “Tell me more.”

+

Boomer has gotten into their share of hot water, over the years. They’re loud. They have a mischievous streak. They’re an individual in the army. They once got caught after accidentally detonating half a block of thermite in a ‘fresher when they were young on Kamino.

But interrogation is new.

By the end, the lieutenant clearly thinks they’re an absolute fool. When her holo finally fades away, Major Vinepiers slowly rises from his desk.

“I have been,” says Vinepiers sonorously, “most accommodating of your deviance.” He doesn’t sound like himself. He sounds, Boomer realizes, like he’s trying to ape Commander Grey. But Vinepiers is at least 30 centimeters shorter than the commander, so he’s standing ludicrously straight, shoulders back, chest puffed out, and chin tipped far, far up.

Boomer carefully maintains their blank expression, still standing at parade rest.

“That ends _now_. Do you hear me?!”

“Yes, sir,” says Boomer. This won’t be pretty, even if the situation is worlds better now that Lieutenant Nyeaddi’s cold eyes are gone. She’d signed off with a dark promise that she’d be watching, which is pure trouble. Boomer’s more concerned by that comment than by any shouting Major Vinepiers can do.

And shout, he does, quickly abandoning his attempt to copy Commander Greyr’s effortless soft, looming menace. Vinepiers steps in close and proceeds to shout until he’s beaded with sweat and going red in the face. If he wasn’t 15 centimeters below Boomer, they’d be standing eye-to-eye. As it is, his breath washes, unfelt, across the collarbone of Boomer’s armor. 

Vinepiers shouts about the glory of the Empire; about insubordination and treachery and deceit. He shouts about Commander Grey’s disappointment. He shouts about busting Boomer down to corporal. He shouts about disrespect to the Emperor, which is the only remark that actually hits home. It's not right. All of what he’s saying is inaccurate, granted. But Boomer is nothing if they’re not a loyal child of the Emperor. 

Boomer stoically stands through it, staring over the major’s head. The bulkhead bulges out where the wall meets the ceiling, suggesting water damage or something like a poorly-insulated server room next door. In the distance, they can hear boots marching. Their initial assessment of the situation was accurate: they’re kriffed.

Occasionally they bark, “Yes, sir!” when a pause calls for it. The major is on a furious roll and doesn’t seem to be expecting any audience participation.

Finally Major Vinepiers exhales gustily, sinking back onto his heels and eyeing them up with obvious dislike. “You’re lucky Commander Grey is the forgiving type, 2726.”

“I’m grateful, sir,” says Boomer. What’s lucky, they know, is that they’re a valuable asset — a battle-tested veteran trooper with pinpoint accurate training and expertise in explosives. It’s the only reason they might make it through this. They still don’t know what happens to clones who have been decommissioned. No one does.

“Get out.”

Boomer puts their helmet on and gets out.

+

They discover that the other troopers have all been directed to the training grounds outside. It’s an enormous area that’s been partially cleared, with some of the local trees, bushes, rocks, and overall swamp left in place to simulate a live battle environment. It is, as far as Boomer knows, intended for recruits farther along in their training. 

It’s a considerable distance from the complex, and it takes some time to march out to it. While they’re walking through the swamp, a landspeeder whizzes past on the cleared track, and they get a good long look at Major Vinepiers’ back in the passenger seat, as it speeds out to the training grounds. 

When they finally arrive at the edge of the grounds, they find Commander Grey addressing the trainers from the back of another speeder.

“This is an opportunity to test your troops’ true mettle, men,” says the commander, and, with an effort, Boomer doesn’t allow their shoulders to tighten. 

Commander Grey barely spares Boomer a look. “Fall in, Corporal.”

Boomer joins the group, knowing that, behind helmets, there are eyes on them. They’re aware of where 3902 is standing, but he doesn’t so much as glance in their direction.

Boomer hasn’t spent much time on the training grounds, but they’ve never seen so much activity and so much equipment out here. In the distance, there are new structures that they can’t quite make out, and something that looks like a turbolaser turret. 

Under their helmet, their eyebrows furrow.

“Major Vinepiers has the assignments,” says Commander Grey.

The major puffs up and begins pairing off trainers whose squads will be working together for the exercise. Once they’re named, they’re sprayed with marker dye to signify their group and then head over to fetch their equipment. They’ll be pitted against pre-programmed battle droids. 

“Red,” says Major Vinepiers, and he glances up from his datapad. There’s a malicious glint in his eyes. “CT-3902 and CT-2726.”

Well, that’s one way to get an opportunity to apologize.

Boomer steps over to the trooper handling the dye, who sprays their shoulder and the side of their helmet, then goes to the portable storage lockers. They pick up a rifle and spare power packs, then glance into the next open locker and stop. It’s full of thermal detonators. The one next to it carries canisters of thermite and detonite blocks.

There are heavy footsteps behind them. “Is this drill live-fire?” Boomer asks. 

“Yes,” says 3902’s seething voice, “you absolute _mynock_.” Boomer turns around. 3902 is looming furiously with a crimson dye streak slashed across his helmet and another across his shoulder. 

“They’re not ready for this.”

“I noticed,” snaps 3902. He snatches up a rifle and a handful of power packs. 

“They’re going to get killed.”

3902 ignores them, slamming a pack into his blaster. 

Boomer stares into the locker for a few more seconds, then turns back toward the superintendent’s landspeeder.

“What are you—?” says 3902, voice rising in alarm when Boomer takes a step forward. “Stop.” He grabs at Boomer’s arm, but they shake him off and stride back to the parked landspeeders. Commander Grey is in conversation with two mechanics, standing beside his speeder.

“Sir,” says Boomer. “Permission to speak?”

The commander turns to them and raises his eyebrows. “Corporal. By all means.”

“The recruits aren’t prepared for a live-fire drill.”

“You’re telling me about the readiness of my own recruits, trooper?” Commander Grey says. He sounds amused, more than anything; like Boomer is wasting his time but he’s willing to humor them for the novelty of it. 

“They’ll be killed, sir,” they say. “In disproportionate numbers.”

“Well, then,” says the commander. “They weren’t adequately trained, were they?” 

When Boomer says nothing, Commander Grey says, “They’ll learn or they’ll die, Corporal. The strongest will survive to serve the Empire. Dismissed.” He turns back to the mechanics as if Boomer isn’t there.

Boomer doesn’t move.

“2726,” someone calls sharply, and Boomer looks back. 3902 jerks his head at them and gives a familiar, brusque hand signal; the one that always meant HERE, NOW.

Boomer goes. 

“It’s Boomer,” they remind 3902 as they pass him, and they head straight for the explosives lockers.

3902 follows them, voice low and helmet comm set to a private channel between them. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” 

They don’t know.

“Giving the kids the best shot at this they’ve got,” they say, and they pick up a belt of thermal detonators. 

+

There’s the telltale _thoom_ of an incoming heavy turbolaser bolt, overhead. Boomer yanks TK-287 back as the blast lands a few hundred meters in front of them and showers them both with earth and fried vegetation. 

“Keep moving!” Boomer shouts, shoving 287 forward again and looking back as the rest of their squad and CT-3902’s squad surge around them. “Get to that cover!”

“Move it, move it!” 3902 bellows at them all. He’s bringing up the rear, herding the injured stragglers and the ones gasping under the weight of their armor. 

The red group is under orders to take the observation post at the far end of the field. On the way there, Boomer’s and 3902’s squads have to make their way through a swamp, across the killing field of barren, exposed land that they’re currently sprinting through, and past the heavy turbolaser ahead that has zeroed in on their position. Other red squads are approaching from different vectors, and, from the sound of it both in the distance and over comms, are facing the brunt of the battledroids. The blue and yellow groups have different objectives altogether. The training ground is a whirlwind of explosions, fire, shouting, and screams of pain. 

The recruits are throwing themselves into the cover offered by a rocky dip in the terrain ahead, and Boomer does, too. They pop their head up over the ridge to get a look at the gun turret. It’s a few hundred meters ahead — a fine distance for Boomer’s old grenade launcher, but no good for throwing a thermal detonator. It’s too far. They duck again.

3902 hits the dirt beside them. “Lost three so far,” he says.

In quick succession, a deafening barrage of turbolaser blasts rain down on the two squads. Boomer keeps their head down but keeps an eye on the huddled recruits. Nobody’s hit; the dip in elevation provides just enough cover that the turbolaser isn’t able to score a direct hit from the angle it’s at, but they’re trapped. They’ll be sitting mynocks if they move.

“CT-2726 and 3902, what are you doing?” shouts Major Vinepiers’ voice through their helmet comms. “Move out!”

“Sir, we are pinned by a turbolaser; requesting support,” says Boomer.

“Denied! I won’t have my garrison hiding like a pack of quivering whisperkits; move forward!”

The turret starts to blast again; Boomer glances to their left and finds the nearest recruits all looking to them and 3902. From the body language of a few, they’re considering following the major’s orders. 

Everything in Boomer, deeply ingrained after years of training, screams to order them forward; the words are hovering unsaid in their mouth. But they’ll all be slaughtered.

“Keep your heads down,” Boomer shouts to them. They _will_ move forward — in a minute, once Boomer has come up with a plan.

“Do _not_!” Vinepiers bellows over the comm. “This is insubordination, 2726; _forward, now_! That’s an order!”

“Don’t,” Boomer says to troublesome TK-287, who’s closest to him, but the idiot shouts, “For the Empire!” and charges up over the ridge — straight into a turbolaser bolt. He’s vaporized instantly.

But two or three recruits have already followed him, then more, and there’s a ragged line of troopers starting to pour out onto the barren ground between them and the turret.

3902 swears in fluent Huttese as he and Boomer go over the ridge, turbolaser beams exploding down all around. “Let’s go! Fan out; keep moving!” 3902 shouts. “Don’t make it easy for that gun!”

“I need cover,” Boomer says to 3902 (“For _what_?” 3902 demands incredulously), and then they whistle sharply to the nearest troopers, gratified to see that one of them is TK-266 and she nods immediately. “You three, on me!” 

They pull a thermal detonator off their belt. “266, know how to use this?” 

“Yes sir!” she says.

Up ahead, the turret takes aim squarely at the group that had been the first to start following 287’s lead, and are thus now the closest to being able to take the position. Bodies go flying. 

From behind, 3902 and the remaining troopers are laying down covering fire, though small arms aren’t all that effective against a heavy turbolaser turret, especially from a distance.

“Take 307 and flank to the right; if I don’t make it from the left, dump that straight down its throat. Don’t depress it until you’re ready to drop it. If I get there first, take cover and provide suppressing fire.”

“Yes sir!” She takes the detonator and actually salutes while running, and then she goes haring off to the right with her assigned squadmate.

“Stay on me,” Boomer says to the unfamiliar remaining recruit, who must be one of 3902’s. “When I stop to set a charge, the droids are going to exit the turret. Keep them off us.”

The recruit nods, audibly panting but keeping pace as the two of them begin to swing around to the left.

The turbolaser is fiendishly powerful, but there’s only one quad-linked barrel. It can’t strike multiple targets approaching from multiple directions; not at the same time. The droids operating it apparently come to the same conclusion, because the hatch opens before Boomer and their recruit have even reached it, and a droid comes out firing.

There are several quick blaster bolts from the opposite side, and the droid goes flying in a shower of sparks. To make that shot while running at a dead sprint in full armor, 266 really is at the top of her class.

The turbolaser tries to track around to fire on Boomer and their recruit, but they put on a burst of speed and slip in under its firing radius. They throw themselves down to their knees, against it, and whip a block of detonite out of their case.

As they begin to set the fuse, they hear and feel the heavy thud of the hatch opening again. Another droid emerges, to immediate fire from Boomer’s escort as well as from 266 and 307 at a distance. A blaster bolt sizzles past Boomer’s left ear but they focus on molding the detonite.

There are droid voices inside the turret — a lot of voices. Boomer slaps the detonite down at the base, where it ought to do the most damage, sets the detonator, and says, “Time to go; at least 20 meters back!”

Pushing their stumbling recruit in front of them, Boomer keeps one eye on where they’re running and one on the turret. They want to provide enough time to escape the blast radius, but the gun is swinging around again and the rest of the two squads are in the middle of the killing field with no cover.

The barrel stops. 

“Down!” Boomer shouts, yanking their recruit down with them, and they hit the detonator.

With a screech of metal and shattered transparisteel, the turbolaser blooms into a fireball. Debris rains down across the field, pinging across Boomer’s armor. After a few seconds, they raise their head. The turbolaser is a knot of broken metal. The two squads are all picking themselves up. 

They haul their wobbly recruit up and give a clap on the shoulder. “Good work, trooper.”

“What?” says the recruit thinly, stumbling off to the rest of the squad.

Boomer does a quick headcount as they jog over to 3902. They lost at least four more recruits, including 287, in that unnecessary chaos. 

Major Vinepiers is shouting something over the comm. 

Boomer blocks his channel in their helmet.

“You’re spaced,” 3902 says, conversationally, but Boomer notices he hasn’t disagreed with any of their actions. “We’re leaving the wounded for the medics and pressing on.”

“Sounds like a plan,” says Boomer, and then there’s a mechanized whir off to the right. Out of the swampy stand of trees, 60 meters away, a new turret, with a distinctive stubby barrel, is rising from its camouflage. 

“Cover!” Boomer shouts, but there won’t be any, not from this angle; the troops begin to scramble.

“Blue squads, we need you on an ion cannon, vector…” 3902 is saying urgently into the comm, listing off coordinates, but the barrel is swinging around—

The cannon fires.

There’s a high-pitched _thoom_ and a tremendous concussive blast of blue-white light, and Boomer is airborne for a split second before slamming into the rocky dirt at speed. On their second or third bounce, they whack their helmet off the ground, and after that, everything is a riot of sounds and colors until they finally stop rolling.

They lie still. Their ears are ringing; their head spinning. They’re — wrong; something is wrong. Nearby, there’s muffled shouting. 

Something isn’t right.

They open their eyes. The heads-up display on their helmet is dark. Their head is killing them and they’re not convinced they aren’t going to throw up in their helmet, which is always to be avoided and something that, with an iron stomach, they don’t normally have to worry about. They painfully drag themself to their knees. All around them, recruits are rolling around or slowly picking themselves up. 

Boomer rises, triumphantly doesn’t fall over despite the wave of dizziness, then hauls the nearest recruit up and yells, “Cover behind the turbolaser!” with force that would ordinarily feel excessive but right now, they can barely hear. They point emphatically toward the pile of large debris that was once the gun turret they’d destroyed, then move on to the next recruit who’s trying to get up.

The one good thing about facing ion cannons is that they’re slow to recharge. They can only get off one shot at a time. They’re usually deployed in multiples for that reason, but there don’t seem to be others rising from the swamp. If they move fast enough, they might actually be able to get most of the two squads to cover before it can fire again.

Boomer runs into 3902 as they’re both rousting the last few recruits. 3902 is wavering on his feet; there are chunks of vegetation wedged into the crevices of his chestplate, probably from the force of his landing. 

Boomer reaches out a steadying hand and laughs wildly, as the two of them stumble after their squads. They shout, “What I wouldn’t give for a good old-fashioned Jedi Force shield—"

It’s like a clap of thunder; a bolt of lightning. Another ion cannon blast. 

A Jedi Force shield.

The clones attacked the Jedi.

Snekfruit Squad attacked Knight Tai and she struck out with yellow eyes and fury, and they killed her.

They’re dimly aware of a nearby explosion, then several, more distant ones; of a ragged cheer rising from their troops. 

The other clone trooper is looking at them. There’s something wrong in the tilt of the trooper’s helmet. 

They remember the clone troopers on Selvaris, scrabbling at them in a violent, mindless mob. Nightmares of spotless, gleaming white armor. Is that what this is? What is this?

They sway and sit down, hard, on the ground, and rip off their helmet. 

It takes a long moment to realize, through the ringing in their ears, that the sounds of battle have stopped. There are shouts in the distance; the cries of the wounded.

“Sir?” asks a muffled voice, “Sergeant?” and there’s a white helmet with black pits for eyes swimming in their vision. There’s red splashed across it. They don’t know if it’s marker dye or if it’s blood.

“Corporal; he got demoted,” corrects another one. Their voices sound like they’re all underwater, at a great distance. 

They can’t breathe.

“Stang, look at him,” someone says. “He must’ve hit his head in that last one.” 

They frown.

A high voice: “Help them, you laserbrains! Grab Corporal 3902 too, he doesn’t look good either; get them up–”

“What’s wrong with them?” someone else asks.

There’s a distant voice bellowing, growing louder by the minute. 

They’re dragged to their feet. Their limbs are heavy and unfamiliar, like they belong to someone else. Maybe that’s who the squad is talking about — a mysterious stranger who’s hanging between two troopers.

Major Vinepiers’ red face swims into view. He’s screaming. They understand every second or third word. CT-2726 is going to be reassigned to a garbage scow, or maybe tossed into the garbage scow; they’re unclear. They’re underwater. They’re defective, according to the major.

But this is a superior officer, so when Major Vinepiers demands, “Do you _understand me_?” they bark, “Sir! Yes sir!” 

+

They’re unceremoniously hauled off the field and shoved into a landspeeder.

The galaxy has fractured around them; it’s spinning. There’s wind in their face. They shut their eyes.

Their senses come back to them as they’re being dragged through the doors of an unfamiliar, dingy space. The ringing in their ears has dropped to a manageable volume. Two troopers are arguing over whether it made sense to bring them here.

“Major only said get out of his sight,” says a wrecked voice. “I’ll take responsibility.”

“You’d better, I want kriff all to do with this,” says the other voice, and its owner tosses something that sounds an awful lot like a helmet bouncing and then drops them squarely into the weak hold of the person on their right. They both stagger and bang into some kind of table. 

The door shuts. There’s silence.

They’re half-sprawled over a stack of old repulsor stretchers. The metal is cool against the side of their face. Their boot scuffs as they make a half-hearted attempt to shove themself to their feet.

The other clone trooper has sunk to the floor with a clatter of armor, like a puppet that’s had its strings cut. His helmet is off and his face has taken on a deathly pallor. He swings his head to look up at them. “You felt it, too,” he says hoarsely. It’s not a question.

“The Jedi weren’t traitors.” Their voice sounds even; normal. “We murdered them.”

“2726,” the trooper says.

She watched over them all; she put herself between them and a howling, glowing rancor in a Sith temple. She pretended not to be amused by the squad’s misadventures. She stole small smiles when she thought no one was paying attention. She got a tattoo with them.

“We killed her.”

“Boomer,” says the other trooper sharply. 

That’s right. They take one deep breath. Two. Three. 

There’s a petrified corporal staring at them. Someone needs them.

“Move out,” Boomer orders.

“What?”

Boomer takes stock. They’re in a dusty room that’s not much more than a glorified medical storage closet, reminiscent of the one that Killjoy once commandeered for his illicit medical work on the _Dania_. Their head feels like someone drove the business end of a hydrospanner straight through and is still twisting it. They tweaked their trick knee. They may yet throw up. They can’t stand up straight. There’s no time for this.

They wrench open a storage drawer and go hunting until they turn up standard medications — low-grade painkillers, anti-emetics. The drawers are dusty, so who knows how old they are, but they’re labeled in Basic with familiar names so they probably weren’t left behind by the Gotal boarding school. 

They dry swallow a couple of capsules and shove the rest at 3902, who looks at Boomer blankly.

“Come on. Now.” They grab CT-3902 by the back of the neck of his armor and drag him up. 3902 flails and grabs the stack of stretchers to stay on his feet.

“Where?” 

Boomer casts about. Both helmets are on the floor. They jam their own on their head and shove 3902’s into his chest. “Put it on and let’s march.”

3902 stares at them, lost.

“We can’t stay here,” they say patiently. “Take those capsules and follow my lead.”

3902 is a mess, which means Boomer is, too — dented, filthy armor streaked with mud and marker dye and recruits’ blood.

The recruits.

“Do you know how many of the kids made it?” they ask, and the wheels behind 3902’s eyes finally start to turn again.

“Most of them,” he says, and he takes the capsules Boomer offered. “I think we lost seven. I got a look as we were leaving; 7298 had it much worse.”

7298, who would have followed his orders to the letter.

While 3902 puts his helmet on, Boomer runs a quick inventory on their supplies. They still have most of their detonite supply and a belt full of thermal detonators. The detonator control for the explosive charges is a useless hunk of junk after the ion cannon blast, but the explosive itself wouldn’t have been affected and Boomer may be able to jury-rig rudimentary timers. The thermal detonators could be hit or miss.

“Move out,” Boomer says again, and this time, 3902 lets them shepherd him out into the corridor. 

It’s empty; they’re clearly deep in the base. They are, Boomer recognizes, in the hall by the major’s office again. 

The academy is in the middle of the jungle. The only way out is obvious. “How’s your flying?” they ask.

“Uhh, I couldn’t fly a capital ship or anything, but I’ve had a little experience on speeders and shuttles,” says 3902.

“That works,” says Boomer. “You’re our pilot.” 

“Pilot?” 3902 asks incredulously.

They two of them are passing Major Vinepiers’ office, then, and Boomer remembers the buckling bulkhead. They stop and pound the keypad for the space next door, and the doors hiss open to reveal— 

Jackpot. As they’d idly suspected, it’s a server room. They step inside, and 3902 follows. The door shuts behind them.

Boomer goes down on one knee and opens their case of detonite. 

“What the hell are you doing?” 3902 demands sharply.

They size up the space, cramped and crammed with overheated equipment. The wall shared with the major’s office is definitely a stress point; there’s a rack of data storage directly beneath the ceiling. “We need to go.”

“ _Desert_?” 

That’s an ugly word.

“Look,” says Boomer, frankly paying more attention to the block of detonite they’re working with than the words coming out of their mouth, “I don’t know what’s happening, but we can’t be here when the commander comes off the training grounds. Something is wrong. I never would have—” 

Their voice fails them. They stop, for a moment, because you can’t set explosives while your hands are shaking; that’s a recipe for disaster. 

It’s not a problem Boomer has ever had to account for before. They're always steady. They're always solid.

“Thank you,” they say, finally. “You can still go back, if you want to." Boomer can't. Not knowing that something is wrong with them. Not to being congratulated on their lightsaber scars. 

Something that once would have been inconceivable, complete sacrilege, is now the only thing they can think to do.

There’s a pause that feels like an eternity, even if it’s probably only a few seconds. Boomer is down on their knees, talking treason with their hands full of explosives. The easiest way for 3902 to return without a stain on his record is obvious.

Finally, he asks gruffly, “Do we have to blow up the base to do it?”

“No,” says Boomer, resuming their work. “But some noise could cover us.”

“Fair enough,” says 3902, and he gives Boomer a hand up when they finish jury-rigging a timer on the block of explosives. 

+

The two of them move with purpose through the corridors. They’re both a mess and one of them is visibly carrying detonite, but Boomer is counting on the gossip machine. It must be widely known across the base by now that there was a live-fire drill this morning. 

They don’t see many people, likely because of the drill. It involved half of the academy’s recruits and trainers. The halls are blessedly quiet. 

They run into two limping recruits making their way toward the actual medical bay, who tiredly salute them, and one tactical officer who looks at them askance but doesn’t challenge. 

They’re nearly at the hangar bay and Boomer is just beginning to think that they may get away with this wildly unplanned march for freedom when 3902 says suddenly, “Oh kriff,” and unceremoniously opens the door they were passing and shoves Boomer through it.

Boomer has no idea what 3902 was reacting to — in the old days, if Target or Dax swore in a certain pitch, they just automatically hit the deck — but now they’re standing inside the control room for the hangar bay with a half dozen tactical officers staring at them.

Boomer and 3902 stare back.

“What is the meaning of this?” barks the ranking officer, a skinny sort in Fleet grays who has risen grandly to their feet. 

“Well,” says Boomer, “it’s kind of a long story—“

With unfortunate timing, there is a distant dull _whump_ as the charge they’d set explodes, four levels down.

The entire control deck goes dark, then comes back up under emergency lighting. Alarms are blaring.

“Report!” someone cries, but the ranking officer is still staring at the pair of bloodied stormtroopers standing there wearing a belt of thermal detonators and a case of heavy-grade explosives.

The officer shouts, “You two—” and draws a blaster pistol, and is immediately burned down by a snap shot from 3902.

It’s not particularly difficult for two highly-trained clone troopers, dressed in full armor, to take out five green Fleeties assigned to a backwater training academy.

“What were you doing?” Boomer asks 3902, shoving a dead officer off the controls they’ve slumped over. Through the viewport into the hangar bay, Boomer can see it’s pure chaos out in the bay, with mechanics, troopers, and pilots running about, clearly at a loss as the alarms and flickering lights continue.

“There was heavy armor coming toward us at a run; could you not hear their feet?” 3902 demands, standing by the door with his rifle still drawn.

“Nope,” says Boomer. They punch the controls to open the old-fashioned hangar bay doors and the massive doors slowly begin to roll open, ponderous and heavy, revealing the jungle beyond. You don’t see this kind of thing much; most modern hangars have magcon fields. This base really must be ancient. 

Boomer can use that.

They glance out at the bay, take their very best shot at a time estimate, and then program in a closing sequence on the doors and start setting another charge right there on top of the control board.

“We don’t have time for this,” grits 3902, clearly hearing something in the corridor that Boomer can’t.

“Make time,” Boomer says patiently, only half-listening to him, wrist-deep in wiring.

3902 growls something under his breath and opens the control room doors. “Did you see them?” he shouts to someone. “They went that way!” It’s not the least bit convincing, but there’s an answering shout and the sound of many sets of running boots, fading away. 

“Don’t quit your day job,” Boomer says over their shoulder, grinning with the adrenaline under their helmet, and 3902 makes a disgusted noise.

“Are you almost done? What are you even doing?”

“With any luck,” Boomer says, giving the detonite block a little love tap and then easing back from it, “blowing the controls after the bay doors have shut behind us. What do you think for speeders?”

3902 steps up, with a distrustful glance at the detonite, and looks out through the viewscreen into the chaotic bay. “One of the Aratechs,” he says. He points to the squad of 74-Z speeder bikes, depowered and parked in the center of the bay. There are mechanics rushing around the bikes but no one seems to be paying them any particular attention.

“Let’s go get one,” says Boomer.

“That’s it? That’s the plan?”

“Don’t start shooting til you have to,” says Boomer. “That’s all I’ve got. It’ll be fine.”

3902 mutters in Huttese again. He really does have a filthy mouth; Boomer has got to find out where he learned that stuff. But for all his complaining, he follows Boomer out the doors and into the panic of the hangar bay. 

They don’t look that out of place amid all the disorder, double-timing it toward the speeder bikes. They pass rows of landspeeders and a couple of old snubfighters. Boomer eyes those in particular; they may be ancient, but Boomer doesn’t like the chances of a speeder bike against a Headhunter. 

“We head for the city, ditch the bike at the gates, and go on to the spaceport on foot,” Boomer says, low, into their private channel.

“You are severely underestimating what I’m looking for when I say I want a plan,” says 3902 under his breath, and then their luck finally runs out.

“Hey! What are you doing?” a stormtrooper shouts at them.

“Checking the bay for, uh, traitors!” 3902 shouts back, and the trooper says, “What?” and then, “Halt!” The rifle rises. 

Boomer wings a shot at the trooper and the two clones break into a run. “Fire in the hole; get the bike going,” Boomer says, and they turn back, grab a thermal detonator off their belt, and wing it back at the nearest snubfighter. The detonator explodes in mid-air, thanks to the ion cannon completely shorting the timer mechanism back on the training grounds, but that’s more than enough time for it to sail through the air and catch the powered-down, unshielded fighter. 

There is a tremendous blast of heat and sound, and now, after a stunned half a second, there are definitely blaster bolts coming at them now from around the bay. The starfighter’s nearest wing is merrily blazing away, mechanics screaming at each other and going after the fire containment systems in an obvious attempt to try to save the fuel tank. 

Boomer lobs another couple of thermal detonators, all with wildly varying release times, at landspeeders and a farther rack of speeder bikes. They hear the slow groan of the hangar bay doors beginning to move in the closing sequence that Boomer set for them and they sprint for 3902, who’s climbed astride a hovering speeder and is shouting at them. 

Boomer dives for the speeder and leaps on behind 3902, grabbing hold of him in a death grip. 3902 floors it, and they rocket out through the slowly closing doors as near misses sizzle across their armor. 

The speeder bike races over the low-slung treetops, the bulbous colorful lines of the city rising in the near distance. “Stay low,” they say to 3902, who nods curtly.

One arm locked around 3902’s middle, Boomer turns back. From deeper inside the bay, there’s another explosion and the doors groan to a grinding halt maybe a meter apart — a gap far too narrow for anyone else to give chase. 

The hangar bay blooms with fire. 

No going back now.

+

3902 yanks Boomer into a doorway and then flattens himself against it. Boomer does their best to follow his lead, though it’s difficult while trailing purple robes everywhere. 

The two of them have been traversing the city in disguise for at least two hours and Boomer’s still not much better at avoiding tripping or at sensing pursuit. They’d do anything for their own armor, at this point, even the stark white stormtrooper armor. They’d had to ditch it with the speeder at the city gates; it was too distinctive. They feel deeply vulnerable without it.

A landspeeder buzzes past, not within view but, from the sound of it, too close for comfort. There are voices distorted by helmets somewhere nearby. 

This part of the city has become a ghost town, citizens ducking indoors and boarding up their windows as soon as it became clear the Imperials were hunting. The only movement comes from rows upon rows of clotheslines strung across the alley above them, robes and tunics and hats fluttering in the breeze.

Boomer wishes they could stop to find something they won’t keep tripping over, but there’s no time. They’re wearing ill-fitting stolen boots and a long, shapeless purple robe with a deep hood, a very ugly hat jammed on their head under the cowl to give them at least the suggestion of Gotal head cones. 

3902 has it slightly better in mechanic’s coveralls and welding goggles, but the coveralls were made for a shorter humanoid and he keeps trying to adjust them in a way that clearly won’t be possible. He’s reluctantly carrying Boomer’s final block of detonite in the toolbox that he also found with his goggles, and Boomer has both of their blaster rifles stowed beneath their voluminous robes.

There’s a long shadow over them. Boomer follows it up and up. 

“Detonite,” they say under their breath, and 3902 swears but opens the toolbox and, with exaggerated care, passes it to them. 

Boomer tucks the explosive beneath their wide sleeves, then presses their hands together to hide the detonite and also the fact that their hands aren’t furry, just in case. 

The tinny voices are moving away from them. They slip out into the alley again and follow the shadow to its origin: an Imperial observation post, looming over the city on a tripod of legs, clearly now abandoned after its two troopers were commandeered to join the search. 

Boomer slaps the charge on a leg. This is the hard part, without a functional detonator mechanism — guessing at what timing will work, without a mission brief or a plan. They’ve already set two detonite blocks that never seem to have gone off at all, from the sounds of things. It could have been lingering effects from the ion cannon, or they could have been found and defused.

The observation post is far enough removed from the nearest cluster of homes stacked one on top of the other that Boomer feels confident in their ability to shape the charge to avoid most collateral damage. They work quickly. 

3902 keeps watch tensely until Boomer finally rises and says, “Let’s go.”

“Is this one going to go off?” 3902 asks, as the two of them glance around the corner and find it deserted. 

“Hope so,” Boomer says honestly.

They dart quickly across the street and hurry past dark shopfronts. Boomer is finding it difficult not to drop into their training — move quickly and lightly, blaster rifle raised and covering each vector. They’ll be questioned if they’re seen — they’ve already taken down one pair of stormtroopers who hailed them — and their disguises don’t stand up to more than a moment's scrutiny, but Boomer doesn’t need to compound the problem by moving like a clone trooper. 

They finally begin to see more civilians again as they grow close enough to the spaceport to hear the engines of heavy ships. There’s a market on the outskirts of the ‘port that’s probably usually wild with activity, and is still respectably busy even with the search disrupting normal business. 

Boomer shares a glance with 3902, and the two of them plunge into the crowds.

Under ordinary circumstances, this is a place Boomer could have happily spent hours. The smells, the street food, the wares that vendors are hawking — there are tables full of vibroblades and gold earrings and strange spices. They hear at least six languages in passing; they see Bothans, humans, Quarren, even a Shistavanen. 

And then, well behind them, there are loud voices, and the vendors they pass start swiftly rolling up their stall fronts. 

Boomer takes one glance back and catches a glimpse of white armor beginning to part the crowds, and then the two of them pass through into the spaceport.

Sleepy Antar’s spaceport doesn’t hold a candle to some of the sleek, massive spaceports that Boomer has moved through, over the years. It’s essentially one big mud bowl, packed with prospective travelers and surrounded by a handful of freighters and personal craft. The largest of them is starting to warm up its repulsorlifts, and the crowd is pushing in that direction. 

The ship is a huge Kuati-manufactured transport, the sort that used to be used to carry troops and munitions — Boomer’s fairly certain they traveled on one, once — but are now slowly phasing out of use with age. This one looks ancient. 

“Have your tickets ready!” a harried voice is shouting from the ship’s ramp, and there does seem to be some kind of informal checkpoint that passengers are passing through. 

3902 leans close and, voice low as they shuffle along in the middle of the throng, asks, “When will that charge go off?”

“Five minutes ago,” Boomer says, wry.

“Plan?” he asks.

“None,” Boomer says, “you?” and 3902 shakes his head tightly as they continue to slowly move toward the checkpoint, pressed in on all sides by other people.

There’s a commotion from behind them— sharp voices and cries of alarm. Boomer glances back. Stormtroopers are cutting a swath through the back of the crowd, grabbing people’s faces to study them and then shoving them aside.

“Company,” they say mildly to 3902.

“Give me my blaster,” says 3902.

“Not yet,” says Boomer, glancing around as the passengers nearest them begin to realize what’s happening and ripples of alarm start to spread. There are whole families out in the open with them.

“Give it to me,” 3902 says, low, through gritted teeth.

Going back isn’t an option; there are at least a dozen stormtroopers, and Boomer would bet they aren’t raw recruits. If two figures break free from the crowd to try to move off to the side, it will be painfully obvious and the stormtroopers will be on them in an instant. And they won’t make it onto the ship — and certainly not past the ticket taker — before the stormtroopers catch up to their group of passengers.

They’re getting closer, now; they’re not more than six meters behind Boomer and 3902, flinging people aside as soon as they’ve confirmed they don’t have a clone’s face. 

“This is it; I’m not going down without a fight,” says 3902.

“Keep your voice down,” Boomer says, dragging him with them as they try to squeeze ahead. The whole crowd is trying to do the same. 

3902 yanks his arm out of their grip and stops in his tracks. “Boomer,” he demands, too loud and looking back over his shoulder far too obviously, “give me—“

In the near distance, there’s a roar, and Boomer spins just in time to see, behind them, the Imperial observation tower sway in a rising cloud of smoke and debris, and then slowly topple. 

Like a flock of avians all wheeling together, as one, the crowd panics. The screams are deafening; people stampede for the ship. Boomer grabs ahold of a coverall strap and tows 3902 along in the crush.

They pass the harried shipping line employee, a Quarren who clearly doesn’t want to be on this planet any more than the passengers do. “Go!” the Quarren shouts, waving the passengers on. “Come on, hurry up, let’s go; everybody on!”

Boomer chances another look back, as the two of them are carried by the crowd up the massive ramp into the ship’s cargo bay. The stormtrooper squad is sprinting back toward the explosion. 

They let themself grin, teeth bared.

+

Just as they’d suspected, Boomer _has_ been on one of these transports before. This class of ship was once a particularly old and rickety people-mover and munitions-carrier for the GAR. They hitched a ride on one, once, returning to Snekfruit Squad after training civilian commandos on Commenor.

If this ship’s schematics are the same as the one Boomer remembers, there should be — and there it is. Moving away from the crowds thronging the corridors, Boomer leads 3902 through several increasingly deserted passages, and then finally shoves him into the triple-shielded space that would have carried proton torpedoes when this was a military ship.

The door closes behind them. The space is largely dark, lit only by a handful of blue emergency lights, and full of dusty crates.

They both stand there. Even through the thick bulkheads, Boomer can feel the ship shaking and the repulsorlifts change over to impulse engines as the transport finishes its lift-off and punches its way out of the atmosphere. 

Neither of them says anything until the ship shudders with what has to be the jump to lightspeed.

3902 exhales and drops like a stone to sit on a crate. Boomer slumps all the way to the floor and collapses.

Boomer listens to the distant, muffled noises of a transport in hyperspace. Their skull is beginning to throb in time with the ship’s engines.

Still lying flat on their back on the deck, they ask, “What’s your name?”

3902 turns to look at them, barely visible in the low light. He barks a hollow laugh. “Lock,” he says. 

“Hi, Lock,” says Boomer, and 3902 — Lock — snorts.

The two of them fall into silence for a long time. Boomer mentally runs through how they wired the two failed charges, in hopes of both figuring out where they went wrong and not letting themself think about the enormous, terrifying questions that lurk in their mind like predators prowling just outside a campfire’s ring of warm light.

It isn’t working especially well, but Boomer’s just exhausted enough, adrenaline and painkillers fading, that they think they might start to doze.

But then, out of nowhere, Lock’s voice asks, “You killed your Jedi?”

The question steps into the light. 

Boomer swallows against the rush of horror, guilt, shame; the one that paralyzed them on the training field, and threatens to take their legs out from under them again every time they let themself feel it. 

“Yeah.” Their voice sounds unfamiliar, to their ears. Thin.

“I couldn’t get close to General Evran,” says Lock. “I tried. There were too many of us. The whole battalion turned on him. Troopers were climbing each other to get to him.” His face is shadowed, washed by the dim blue emergency lights. “He killed dozens before we overwhelmed him.” His voice is low, blank in its shock. “Why would we do that?”

“Orders,” Boomer says, but they know that’s not right even as they say it, and Lock makes a sharp noise. 

“Bantha shavit,” he says; “I didn’t even _question_ it, I didn’t hesitate or regret anything afterward—” He cuts himself off, breathing unevenly.

“Something was wrong,” Boomer says, into the stillness. “I didn’t know before.”

“Yeah,” says Lock. “I couldn’t figure out what it was until you said ‘Jedi,’ and then it was like...” He trails off, but Boomer gets it. Everything, all at once. It took Boomer’s legs out from them. Flattened them. It still threatens to, when they let themself think about it.

If Boomer was alone; if they didn’t have Lock to confirm having the exact same experience, they don’t know what they would have thought. 

That they were losing their mind, probably. 

They don’t know what they would have done.

Boomer says slowly, “We heard rumors about some kind of disease that made a trooper attack his Jedi, but this…” 

They remember sitting close with their brothers in the shuttle’s cramped quarters, making a pact for H1F1 to stun any trooper who threatened Knight Tai; thinking they were all being paranoid. Thinking of _course_ a safety of two troopers’ voice commands being required to disable H1F1’s subroutine would be more than sufficient. They’d never even considered the possibility that they could all turn on her.

They can hear the rustle of Lock’s stolen clothes as he stiffens. “Are we still sick?”

Boomer feels it, now that they have time to think. Just not in the way Lock is asking.

“I don’t know,” they say.

The vibration of the engines travels through the deckplates and up their spine, and they zone out to it. 

They’re exhausted. They feel like hell. They can’t go on in this state. Lock can’t be doing much better.

“If you want to sack out, I can take first watch,” they offer.

“Sleep?” Lock says incredulously. “You think I can _sleep_? You must be joking.”

“Then I’m gonna sleep,” says Boomer, finally peeling the ugly hat off their head and wadding up it up in the cowl of their stolen robe to use as a pillow. “Wake me up if the feel of the engines changes. We’ll have to be ready to move.”

“You think they’ll figure out we were onboard and chase us?” Lock asks dubiously.

On the one hand, Boomer doesn’t think the Empire would bother sending resources after two stormtrooper non-coms, but on the other, they have a strong suspicion that Commander Grey is the type to hold a grudge. 

“Better safe than sorry,” Boomer says. “We’ll jump ship as soon as we can.”

“Whatever,” says Lock flatly, settling in against his crate, and he doesn’t speak again.

Boomer has always had the ability to clear their mind. It didn’t do much for them in their meditation sessions with— They stop themself, nausea rising again. 

But it’s a vital skill for a demolitionist, being able to close your senses to everything except what’s right in front of you. You don’t have the luxury of distraction, regardless of pain or confusion or turmoil, when you’re trying to set a charge. Boomer’s skills have always extended to their ability to fall asleep. Anywhere, any time, any position, they can make it happen.

They breathe evenly, in through their nose and out through their mouth. They think through the detonation sequence of a thermite cluster. They fall away.

* * *

They’re woken by a sharp blow.

They lunge upright, and immediately regret it; their whole body hurts. 

“Someone’s coming,” Lock hisses out of the darkness, and Boomer wakes up enough to yank their hood up just as the doors hiss open and light pours into their hiding place.

“Uhh,” says the broad-shouldered figure standing there flat-footed, silhouetted in the open doorway.

Lock, who’s looming just beside the door, yanks the stranger inside (over their yelp), shoves them toward the crates, and books it. Boomer scrambles up and follows, pounding the panel to temporarily shut the door behind them.

“Hey!” their captive is yelling, and Boomer’s fairly sure they hear something about stowaways as the two of them sprint down the corridor.

They take a right at the first junction and come out in the transport’s primary mess, which is teeming with passengers waiting in the chow line, sitting at tables and on the floor. They plunge into the crowd, picking their way around people eating and trying to move at a speed that doesn’t immediately scream ‘We’re running from the ship’s crew,’ and it immediately becomes obvious that they’ll be spotted long before they can cross the mess; standing up means they stand out like sore thumbs.

Boomer spots a gap on the floor and plunks themself down in it, grabbing Lock’s leg to stop him. Lock gapes down at them, and Boomer chops him in the back of the knee and yanks him down.

They’ve sat down in a loose circle with a dining family of two dozen Chadra-Fan — tiny, furry bipedal people with enormous ears, glossy black eyes, upturned snouts, and sharp teeth — and are being stared at with what is either great interest or consternation, it’s hard to say which. Boomer feels like a giant; the tallest Chadra-Fan can’t be more than a meter tall. Boomer could easily swallow up one of the infants in their cupped hands. 

They surreptitiously check to be sure that their hood is still in place, and then wave.

One of the children lifts a tiny paw and waves back.

Several crewmembers appear in the doorway that Boomer and Lock had run through. They’re conferencing, squinting into the dinner crowd.

Someone taps Boomer on the side. They look over, and the Chadra-Fan seated beside them — sitting with a regal bearing, fur gone silver with age — placidly hands them a slice of some kind of bread.

On Boomer’s other side, Lock has also been given bread, and while Boomer nods to the silver-furred Chadra-Fan and immediately ducks their head and starts chowing down, Lock stares at his food for a moment before he says, “Thank you,” and takes a bite.

The crewmembers walk right past them as the two of them continue doing their best impressions of ordinary passengers out for a meal with the neighbors.

Once the three crewmembers have passed, Boomer exhales and turns toward the elderly Chadra-Fan beside them— and Lock pinches their arm.

“Thank you, very much, for your hospitality,” Lock says, leaning over Boomer.

The little Chadra-Fan furrows their brow. “Does your friend not speak?”

“They’ve, uh, taken a vow of silence until we’ve fully escaped,” says Lock awkwardly. He wasn’t wrong to cut Boomer off, they belatedly realize, since the two of them have the same voice, but he is really and truly terrible at this. 

“Oh! You’ve run away together? From your families?” A Chadra-Fan clasps their hands in front of their chest. “How romantic!”

Lock chokes. “Oh, we’re n—”

Boomer prods Lock; they don’t need to look at him to have an idea of the face he’s making. 

“I mean… thank you,” Lock says, with poor grace, and Boomer nods to their new friends, who immediately begin peppering Lock with friendly questions.

+

The Chadra-Fan are traveling past Balmorra, which is apparently the next stop this transport is making, to settle in the Ploo system with the rest of their clan. They make introductions; there are siblings, mates, parents and children. They chitter to each other in a language Boomer has never heard before, but most of them seem to speak at least some Basic, apart from the youngest children. 

For their part, Lock picks two aliases that, from his long pauses, are very obviously not his and Boomer’s real names, and Boomer finds themself briefly, incongruously struggling not to bark a laugh.

The venerable silver-furred matriarch of the clan, who introduced herself as Ilkat, makes a noise that sounds an awful lot like polite, bemused disbelief, but all she says is, “A pleasure to meet you.”

Her clan is asking Lock about Antar, where they apparently didn’t disembark during the ship’s brief stop. Lock looks harried, and he’s answering slowly as he obviously thinks through his responses, but he is answering. Boomer probably shouldn’t leave him alone to think up cover stories on his own, but on their other side, Ilkat lays a paw on their arm. The fur around both of her wrists is thin, like it’s been worn away by friction over a long period of time.

“Can you respond to yes and no questions, my friend?” Ilkat asks, and Boomer slowly nods, mindful of keeping their hood up.

“Are you well?”

It’s a question that was probably raised when Lock started speaking on their behalf, but it’s overwhelmingly kind and it shakes Boomer right down to their bones. 

They nod. It’s the truth, in response to the question that Ilkat likely was asking. 

Clearly, she sees the hesitation. Her head tilts and she glances behind Boomer, momentarily. “Are you safe?” the little old matriarch persists, her voice quieter. 

Boomer thumbs in Lock’s direction behind them and nods firmly, to leave no room for doubt.

“Very well,” says Ilkat. “Do you and your man have an assigned berth?”

She’s asking, politely, if they stowed away in the chaos on Antar. Boomer feels confident by now that she’s not an agent of the Empire or the shipping company. They shake their head.

“My family has a small stateroom to ourselves on deck nine. We don’t have extra bunks, but you are both welcome to join us,” says Ilkat.

It’s a deeply generous offer, and one that’s badly needed. If they keep sleeping rough in random corners of the ship — and Boomer caught a few hours, but Lock will need to rest, soon — they’re going to be found by the crew. 

Boomer gratefully bows as deeply as they can without revealing their face. 

+

The clan welcomes them with open arms, literally — Boomer ends up entertaining an armful of inquisitive little kids while their family eats. As far as they can tell, child-rearing is done by community within the clan, and now that Ilkat has extended an invitation to temporarily join them, they are simply another adult, one with a conveniently large lap, to help mind the children.

Lock is also unceremoniously passed a child, but Boomer takes one look at his face and reaches out for the sleepy toddler. 

“Thanks,” Lock mutters, passing her over, and Boomer lets her use her little claws to scuttle up into the join of their neck and shoulder and go to sleep there in a fold of their robe. Unlike two of her older siblings, or maybe cousins, she isn’t making a game of trying to pull off Boomer’s hood, so they leave her be.

The older kids have figured out that if they pretend to swat at Boomer’s hood, they’ll get picked up and jokingly hung upside down while they scream with delight — Boomer glances at the adults the first time Boomer does it, but nobody seems to be concerned, so they keep gently roughhousing — and that occupies them for a good long while.

When the family starts gathering empty dishes and children, Boomer taps Lock, and, keeping their hands low and mostly hidden by their sleeves, they sign, ‘Stay.’ They point at the Chadra-Fan. ‘Safe.’ 

Lock frowns, leaning in. He glances around the mess, which is steadily clearing out. “Stay _here_?”

Boomer knows a sign for sleep, but they can’t remember if it’s a GAR-standard hand signal or one of the ones that their squad made up with Cog.

They use it, but Lock looks at them blankly, so they press both palms together and make a pillow of their hands against their cheek, and then point to the Chadra-Fan again. 

“Is that a good idea?” Lock asks, low.

Boomer shrugs expansively.

+

Ilkat accurately represented the size of the clan’s space. It’s a tiny windowless room with two vertical rows of three bunks each; they’re sized for someone taller than Boomer, so the adult Chadra-Fan can fit at least three to a bunk, and two of the lower bunks seem to have been made into little nests for the kids. 

Ilkat’s adult daughter gives them blankets and apologetically shows them to the patch of space that’s available on the floor between the two lowest bunks. 

Boomer tries to convey gratitude with the bob of their head; Lock, thankfully, says, “Floor will do us fine, thanks.” He lays down, cushioning the hard deck with his blanket. Boomer sits beside him, propped up against the wall. They move slowly, the bruises of the previous day catching up. Their head is still pounding.

A couple of the kids have already started to drop off to sleep and are getting tucked in. One of the more active troublemakers tries to come play with Boomer again, but an adult catches her and gently turns her around and nudges her back to bed. There’s love in every movement; every soft chitter.

They’ve never spent this kind of close, sustained time with a family, before. They try not to watch too obviously.

“Hey,” says Lock. Boomer glances down. He’s pillowed his head on his jacket, and is looking up at them. “You gonna sleep?”

They shake their head, wrapping their blanket around their shoulders. Not yet. They sign, ‘Later,’ and Lock sighs.

“I don’t know those hand signals,” he says, exasperated, and he rolls over with his back to Boomer.

The adult family members move around quietly as the kids drop off to sleep. Some scurry up to the top bunks; others stand near the door, talking softly. There are a few nods in the direction of the corner that Boomer and Lock are taking up, but mostly, they’re left alone. 

Boomer dozes, mind blank.

* * *

The trip to Balmorra takes a full day in hyperspace. Lock mostly sleeps, or at least pretends to sleep. 

Boomer watches over Lock and babysits. Chadra-Fan, it turns out, don’t sleep more than two hours in a cycle, and the kids even less; it’s no wonder they take care of the children as a group and they’re willing to — under a watchful eye — let them play with a stranger. Boomer is assiduously careful to keep the kids away from their face, and away from the blasters strapped to the small of their back under their robe.

They talk with Ilkat, too; or, rather, Ilkat talks and asks the occasional yes/no question, like she’s making sure that Boomer knows they’re part of the conversation. She’s shrewd and she knows, they think, that they and Lock aren’t who Lock claimed to be — a mechanic and his “friend” (Lock is so bad at this), on their way to start a new life together. But she doesn’t ask about them, and she doesn’t talk about the scars on her wrists or why the children sometimes cry out for someone who’s not there. 

Instead, she tells them about the life waiting for her people in the Ploo system, and about silly things the children have done, and about other passengers their clan has met on their journey.

Boomer is unspeakably grateful.

When the ship makes its final approach to Balmorra, most of the family opts to go to find a viewscreen to watch the ship land planetside. Lock lies still through the chaos and their farewells to Boomer but sits up as soon as the door closes behind the last of them, providing hard evidence for Boomer’s theory that he’s been pretending to sleep so he doesn’t have to talk to anyone. “We there?” he asks, climbing to his feet.

Ilkat remained behind, as did her daughter Taiga and several children who couldn’t be torn away from an impenetrable game they’ve been playing with some metal scraps. “Nearly,” says Ilkat, stroking the fur of a grandchild who’s decided to crawl into her lap. 

Lock glances at Boomer, who meaningfully jerks their head at Ilkat, and, keeping their hand mostly within their sleeve, signs, ‘Thank you.’ 

The GAR didn’t have a battlefield hand signal for ‘thank you.’ That was another Snekfruit special. It’s an evocative move, though, pointing to their own mouth and then gesturing outward, and Lock seems to get the prompt.

“Thank you, very much, for your clan’s kindness,” he says to Ilkat and Taiga. “We wish we could repay it.” Boomer pats his shoulder in approval. That was almost gracious.

“It wasn’t done for payment,” Ilkat says serenely, and the toddler in her lap — the tiny one who fell asleep draped across the crook of Boomer’s neck, yesterday — reaches up with her paws and squeaks demandingly. Ilkat gives a rumbling laugh. “Though it has been rendered, I think. My friend?”

Boomer smiles, behind their hood, and reaches down to pick up the little one. They can’t talk to her, but they can, and do, gently swing her around while she laughs.

A few things happen at once: the ship enters Balmorra’s atmosphere with a tremendous shudder, and the startled toddler yelps and makes a grab that snags Boomer’s hood. 

Even over the sound of the kids all gasping as the ship shakes, and then laughing and chattering amongst themselves, Boomer hears Ilkat’s indrawn breath and knows it’s too late. The processed air is cold on their bare face.

Taiga pads over and asks something wondering in her own language, peering up at the two of them.

“Not brothers,” says Ilkat, her voice trembling. 

Boomer’s heart sinks. 

She holds up her paws. “Give Kelk to me.”

Boomer kneels and passes the toddler into her outstretched arms. She immediately hands her to Taiga and then pushes Taiga backward, calling sharply to the other children. They immediately drop their game and flood around her, chirping in a pitch Boomer hasn’t heard before, and Taiga herds them into a corner and stands in front of them.

“I know what you are,” says Ilkat, voice low with venom. She spits on the deck. “Jedi killers.”

Towering over her even while kneeling, Boomer flinches. 

“Leave our family,” hisses Ilkat, her fur bristling. “Now.”

“We’re leaving,” Lock says grimly, and he grabs Boomer by the arm and pulls them to their feet. 

Boomer doesn’t look back as the two of them bomb down the corridor, but they know Ilkat came to the door to watch them leave. Even after they turn the corner, they can feel the ghost of her accusing stare between their shoulderblades.

+

The two of them sit on a stack of crates in the cargo bay, waiting with the other passengers who will disembark at Balmorra. With each passing moment, as the ship finalizes its landing sequence, it becomes increasingly clear that Ilkat hasn’t sent the crew after them. It’s a mercy that Boomer’s not sure they deserve.

Boomer is watching the nearest passengers double-check and triple-check their luggage, a few meters away, when Lock says, “This isn’t going to work.”

Boomer glances at him, and Lock gestures between the two of them. “One face, people might forget, but two?”

He’s not wrong. Boomer knows that. But, faced with the thought of being completely alone for the first time in their entire life, voice rusty from disuse, they say, “We could come up with something better than a hood and a vow of silence.”

Lock snorts, and Boomer smiles faintly beneath their hood and shuts their eyes. 

There’s a faint shiver through the ship as the landing gear makes contact with the ground. Other passengers begin gathering their things. Boomer uses the frenzy as cover to slip Lock’s blaster rifle to him.

The ship’s heavy bay doors begin to open and people push forward, and Lock rises and turns to face Boomer.

“I wouldn’t have made it out, without you,” he says, evenly. “Don’t know whether to thank you for that.”

Boomer exhales, and doesn’t say the truth: that without Lock, they wouldn’t have even tried. 

“Thank me later,” they say, instead, and Lock snorts again.

There’s a conspicuous pause where one of them once might have said ‘May the Force be with you.’ 

From the fraught silence, Boomer thinks Lock feels it, too.

“Good luck, Boomer,” Lock says, finally, and he melts into the crowd.

+

Balmorra is an industrial world. It crawls with stormtroopers, officers, and Imperial bureaucracy, the sky heavy and gray from the byproducts of the Empire’s heavy manufacturing. Boomer has to get off-planet and out of the Core as fast as possible.

The first thing they do is get their bearings and painstakingly find their way to a seedy shop, buried deep in a dark alley, where the owner’s eyes light up when he gets a good luck at Boomer’s Imperial-grade blaster. 

Boomer sells the rifle for less than they think it’s worth, but they’re out of options. It’s enough to fund a change of clothes, a hold-out blaster that’s probably going to explode in their hand at some point, and a little extra to set aside. 

Changing in the back of the clothing shop, they catch a glimpse of the long scar that bisects their chest. 

They turn their back on the mirror.

They’re vindicated in prioritizing the change of clothes when, safely decked out in nondescript trousers, boots, tunic, and jacket with a thick ruff they can pull up over their mouth, all topped off by a slouchy hat to hide their regulation haircut, they turn their face to the side as they pass a stormtrooper squad and hear the sergeant saying something about a rifle and purple robes.

They pick up the pace, after that.

This world is fully under Imperial control. The fenced-in shipyards and warehouses bristle with guards and sprawl as far as the eye can see, placed near the spaceport and the city for ease of deliveries. Boomer skirts them as much as they can, sticking to the city streets, but it’s impossible to avoid them altogether.

They have to walk past one of the biggest ‘yards for several blocks. The forcefield surrounding it isn’t tall enough to hide that there’s an unfamiliar landing craft under construction — an ominous four-legged gray skeleton looming far above their head.

+

Back at the spaceport, Boomer buys a plate of noodles and, as they mindlessly shovel food into their mouth, studies the large starmap that’s being projected above the food vendors and benches. They let foot traffic flow around them. The spaceport is swarming with stormtrooper squads but they’re not moving with any particular urgency, so their presence doesn’t seem to signify the heightened security that would come with, say, catching a surly clone trooper wearing mechanic’s coveralls.

According to the departure board, the next transport out leaves in only a few minutes. Boomer buys a ticket from a droid at the service desk.

They look the ship over with a critical eye before boarding. This passenger liner is a little smaller than their last stowaway transport, but it’s large enough and run-down-looking enough that they think they should still be able to lose themself among the passengers. 

Bash would probably know for sure, they think. He’d be much better at this; at being friendly without being memorable, if he needed to be. 

They hang back until they’re sure the crew is only asking for tickets, not for identification, and they file onboard at the tail end of a rowdy group of construction workers who sound like they’re headed to a new project somewhere along the Daragon Trail. The bored crewmember who’s handing out berth assignments seems to think that Boomer is part of that construction crew, and Boomer doesn’t disabuse them of the notion, so they wind up in a packed stateroom with 14 strangers. 

A few of their new bunkmates shoot glances Boomer’s way as they walk in, but the interest doesn’t read as more than idle curiosity, and they’re all caught up in some kind of argument about a borgleball match gone awry.

Boomer finds the one bunk that hasn’t been claimed yet (the top one that’s closest to the ‘fresher, unsurprisingly) and climbs up. 

It’s not especially comfortable, but they’ve slept worse places. They haven’t stretched out in a bunk in what feels like a lifetime, now. 

They’re not responsible for other troopers’ well-being anymore. They’ve tended to their immediate needs. They have time to think, finally — they’ll have two days’ worth of it, before the ship arrives on Alderaan.

The way Ilkat’s face had blazed when she said, ‘Jedi killers.’ 

Boomer not only killed Knight Tai — and they did kill her; they may have been unconscious when it happened, but they know the killing shot was taken with their rifle. But they all forced her to attack them. They took her down with them.

Boomer had never seen Knight Tai move the way she did, that day. She was in a blind rage. It was pure violence; she was fury personified. They can’t forget her eyes.

Boomer rolls and turns their back on the rest of the room. Their hands, always rock-steady, are shaking.

They’d never given a second thought to Knight Tai’s fate, before the disastrous exercise on the Antar training grounds. They’d been grimly satisfied to know that Bash had shot their Jedi in the head. Boomer’s one and only regret was that they hadn’t killed her sooner. 

It’s not right. Even if she had been a traitor, they should have felt something. 

Practicing meditation together after discovering Boomer’s complete inability to communicate telepathically; Knight Tai dryly pointing out that, while it was a step up over physically shouting, if they didn’t want to give her a headache, they needed to stop thinking so loudly. Flinging herself between the squad and danger, time and time again. Snekfruit tattoos in in a back alley parlor. How she’d laughed, dancing with Cog on Kal’Shebbol. 

Jedi Master Hil’lani saying, ‘Gather your men,’ and the way Knight Tai had narrowed her eyes when she corrected, ‘My troops.’

She’d seen them. Meals and battles and strategy sessions. Three years together.

Boomer hadn’t forgotten any of it, but they hadn’t been able to think of it, either. It was like there had been a forcefield up between them and memories of the good times, leaving Knight Tai distorted as a looming monster. 

The forcefield is gone, now. Their brain feels too big for its skull.

The thrum of a lightsaber. Cutting down Cog with flickering yellow eyes. _Kill the traitor._

They press their face into their shaking hands, eyes hot, and breathe.

They don’t have anyone to watch out for. They’re drifting, rudderless.

The one silver lining of the last six months is that they’d been so confused and conflicted by non-Jedi Force users that they had avoided thinking about them altogether. They spaced Leeadra’s comm code months ago. They didn’t try to find Dax or turn him in, even though he reached out via the Force multiple times; hell’s teeth, that was _Dax_. The longer they were away from the rest of the squad, the fuzzier thoughts of him had become. 

Boomer doesn’t know where the hell the Snekfruits all are now, but it has to bode well that Dax touched their mind, even if Boomer responded by violently shoving him out. Dax pushed along the feeling that Target and Bash were alive, so maybe, just maybe, the three of them are each still out there somewhere. 

Boomer misses the squad like they’re missing a limb. They’d do anything to have just one of them by their side now. But it’s for the best they’re on their own.


	2. Chapter 2

Boomer is in the spaceport on Alderaan for less than an hour before they make eye contact with someone who recoils from the sight of their face. 

Boomer’s perfectly cognizant that they’ll never count situational awareness as a personal strength. They’re blithely oblivious as a general rule and also got too close to explosive ordinance a number of years back and now don’t hear well on one side. 

If they noticed a stranger’s reaction, it had to have been dramatic.

They pull the collar of their jacket as high as it’ll go and duck into the crowds of travelers, and they take a circuitous route to go wait for their next transport outside.

* * *

On a passenger freighter between Hok and Taanab, they sleep in a 20-bunk stateroom with 35 other passengers. It’s packed with families fleeing unrest — it smells like sweat and too many bodies packed into too small of a space, which, apart from the occasional cries of young children, feels like home.

One nearby family has a particularly fussy baby. One of the parents paces with the child as much as possible, just a few steps back and forth in the tiny space between bunks, and catches Boomer’s eye as they lie in their bunk, unable to sleep, late one cycle. The parent gives Boomer an apologetic, exhausted-looking smile as the baby keeps making little angry hiccuping noises.

“Where are you headed?” the parent asks, quiet and friendly in the stillness as others sleep.

It’s a good question. 

The farther Boomer is from the Core and from worlds that saw heavy deployment from the Grand Army of the Republic, the better off they’ll be. They’re stretching credits from the sale of their Imperial blaster and doing odd jobs here and there. They buy short-hop tickets to make it as far as they can on the amount of credits they have available at that time. It’s all spectacularly unplanned and unexamined. It’s the first time in their life they’ve ever experienced directionlessness, that’s for sure. It’s also the first time in their life they’ve had money, so they’re pretty sure they’re not budgeting well.

The hardest part is keeping to themself, but they remember the look on the face of the stranger who (probably) recognized them in the Aldera spaceport. They hear Ilkat the Chadra-Fan matriarch hissing ‘Jedi killers’ in their dreams. 

They can’t remember the last time they had a real conversation with someone. They were never alone, as a clone trooper, and now they always are.

The parent is still looking at them with a friendly smile.

Boomer tilts their head, then points to their mouth, their ear, and shakes their head, in the friendly universal gesture for ‘no Basic.’

If they start talking, they don’t know that they’ll be able to stop.

* * *

In the administrative capital of Taanab, a plume of thick smoke rises high above the city. The planet is an agricultural wonder, growing endless crops exported across the Inner Rim, but the sky is overcast and the air is thick with acrid chemicals. Boomer already knows what explosive was used. The stench is a dead giveaway.

Standing on a shuttle’s ramp to catch a few minutes’ non-recycled air before the ship gets in the air again, Boomer leans against the nearest stanchion. Two crew members are talking as they take a break from struggling to shove a loader full of packaged root vegetables up the ramp.

“It’s the AgriCorps,” the shorter one is saying. “Had a chapter house here; based all their Inner Rim operations out of Pandeth.” 

“Yeah?” says the other, and their lip curls as they look out across the city’s skyline. “Not anymore, huh?”

“Imps are finally burning the buildings this week,” says the short crew member, starting to shove at the heavy loader again. Their tone takes a turn for the sardonic. “No more Jedi scum, right?”

Boomer still half-expects the satisfied ghost of _kill the traitor_ every time someone says the word Jedi in their hearing, but this time, like every time, there’s nothing.

The taller crew member snorts. Boomer fades back as the two of them push the loader closer, but they don’t make it inside in time to avoid hearing the other voice say, “Please. They’ve all been dead for months.” 

There’s a squad of white-armored stormtroopers marching across the spaceport, toward a troop shuttle parked on the far landing pad. Their form is off; three of them are consistently out of step with the others. They’re a pack of greenhorns.

Boomer watches them for longer than they should.

* * *

A cook in their next starliner’s mess lets Boomer convince her that they can peel tubers in trade for a couple of meals.

“Looks like you’ve got some practice,” she says approvingly, watching their hands fly.

Boomer got put on their fair share of KP duty on Kamino for their childhood habits of (1) cheerful cheek and (2) playing with explosives. 

They smile, and shrug, and the kitchen lapses into silence again.

* * *

Somewhere in hyperspace, on a medium-sized starliner, they count credits and realize that, despite making an uneducated attempt to stretch their funds as thinly as possible, they barely have enough left to pay for a cheap bowl of noodles.

They reach a space station orbiting Bogden’s seventh moon by the skin of their teeth, and by the meals they bartered for by peeling tubers and hefting boxes of ingredients in the ship’s galley. 

In the local seedy tapcafe, they spend a few of their precious last handful of credits on a watery lomin ale so they won’t get thrown out for loitering. They set up camp at a corner table, listening to the unenthusiastic, off-key house band, and take stock.

Their old squads are scattered to all corners of the galaxy, under the Imperial thumb, or dead. There’s no one left to comm, not that that matters when they lost themself for months and they still don’t know why. The thought of turning on someone else like a rabid vornskyr—

Out of the question.

But so is lying down and giving up. They left that choice behind in an abandoned medical supply closet on Antar, when they hauled Lock to his feet and improvised their way out of the academy. 

“Hi,” Boomer says, bellying up to the bar, and the bartender gives them a suspicious look. “I’m Boomer; they/them.”

There’s a long moment where the bartender keeps polishing a glass, and Boomer thinks they aren’t going to answer. Then, finally, the bartender says, “She/her. What d’you want?”

She’s down to business. Boomer can work with that. “If a person was looking for discreet work that would take them offworld, where would they start?”

She eyes them dubiously. She’s a Gran, so that’s a lot of eyes. “How discreet?”

“A ship that’s looking for a hand and isn’t a stickler for red tape,” Boomer says. “I can load cargo, wash pots, help with basic repairs, anything needed. I’m not picky.”

The bartender turns away, clearly done with this conversation, and gestures vaguely with her wet dishtowel at a dark corner of the tapcafe. 

At first, Boomer thinks she’s directing them to a nearby table where a figure is sitting facedown in what’s left of a spilled drink, but as they get closer, they understand that she was actually pointing to a couple of displays set up along the back wall. They fizzle and twitch with age and ill use, showing long strings of fuzzy text. They’re advertisements, Boomer realizes.

They scan through everything three times. There are plenty of listings for pilots but Boomer couldn’t pilot their way out of a wet pile of Koolachian silk. They’d always had an interest in learning some of the basics, but it wasn’t a skill that had been required for their function. Cog would have taught them, probably, but Boomer hadn’t prioritized it, and now Cog would never teach them.

Mercenary wetwork is the most natural fit with their experience. They don’t doubt they could find a unit that would be happy to accept a skilled demolitionist with few questions asked.

Boomer’s a soldier. They’ve never suffered pangs of conscience over their work. They did what they were ordered to do, but in the end, they couldn’t trust it. They absolutely couldn’t trust orders from an unfamiliar mercenary band.

One of their hands picks up a faint tremor. They move on.

Eliminating the ads for mercenary groups and second-shift pilots leaves them with one ship looking for a cook — definitely not an area of personal expertise — and a handful advertising for grunts. It’s hard to say whether the latter are actually looking for crew or for toughs who are selling their blaster skills. But Boomer’s out of credits and out of options, so they smile, and clench their hand to steady it, and go to find the starliner personnel manager who’s listed.

* * *

They’ve been a runner in the galleys of an enormous ship cruising the Hydian Way for three days when they wake up a sense of movement and to hands under their pillow. Boomer grumbles and is about to roll away in protest — then they remember they went to bed alone.

Their eyes snap open. There’s a face hovering over them. 

The face-haver — it’s the shifty-eyed human named Urad, Boomer realizes — flails back, cheap datapad and small sack in hand.

That’s _Boomer’s_ cheap datapad, judging by the very large, distinctive crack to the case, so presumably, that’s also Boomer’s sack of hard-won credits: the quarter-pay advance they’d received for signing on with this ship.

Being robbed is one way to wake out of a dead sleep.

Urad has staggered back into the relative safety of their other two bunkmates — a pair of big ugly brothers, both of whom are looming now.

“Not very neighborly of you,” Boomer says, rubbing at their eyes. They rise from their bunk. “That’s not yours.”

It doesn’t go especially well.

+

The _Witten_ is configured for the comfort of passengers, not crew. It takes some doing to find an out-of-the-way spot in the crew corridors, but Boomer eventually turns up a circular viewscreen on deck 35, where they can sit in the nook created by the viewscreen’s curvature. 

They’ve got their datapad back, though it won’t do them much good after cracking it in half over a brother’s head. The money’s gone. Boomer’s perfectly capable of defending themself, but pitted against two big bruisers and one dirty fighter while hungry, tired, and woken out of a sound sleep wasn’t their finest moment.

On the bright side, they’re fairly sure one of the brothers broke his hand on Boomer’s jaw. You’d think he would have known to avoid going for the face. 

They watch the long, thin white lines of the stars streaking past in hyperspace, stark against the black, and think again about flying.

Boomer always had a purpose, one that they were literally made for, and piloting didn’t fit into that purpose so they never picked it up. Then again, no one in the upper echelons of the GAR thought a squad needed a demolitionist who could serve as requisitions officer, either, and Boomer had once done that for the better part of a year. Boomer had done a lot of things that the GAR thought it didn’t need but Boomer had known their squads needed.

They have no idea what anyone needs from them anymore.

+

When they report for their shift in the galley, the cook in charge takes one look at them and says dubiously, “The hell happened to you?” 

Boomer’s jaw must be starting to turn all the colors of an exploding star.

“Self defense,” says Boomer.

He sighs. “The shavit for brains twins?”

Boomer knows how this goes. They shrug genially. “It was dark; who can say, really?”

“Hell’s teeth,” says the cook. “All right, come on, get to work.”

+

When Boomer returns to their quarters at the end of their shift, they find the brothers’ things gone. You can’t shift heavy boxes of ingredients with a broken hand, and to the other brother’s minimal credit, he seems to have stuck with his family.

Their buddy Urad is still there. If looks could kill, Boomer would be fried ten times over. Urad doesn’t respond to Boomer’s greeting and the air in the tiny set of quarters is so thick it could probably be cut with the vibroblade that Boomer is going to have to put beneath their pillow to sleep.

Boomer knows, they _know_ , their threat perception is for shavit. So they turn off the lights, roll over in their bunk, and lie in wait with their good ear turned toward the gap between bunks. After an hour or two, there are footsteps in the darkness.

They say, mildly, “I wouldn’t.” 

There’s a pause, and then the footsteps back away.

Boomer spends their remaining time on board working in the galley under the sympathetic head cook as much as possible, and the rare off-shift sleeping with one eye open — or, more accurately, dozing fully-clothed, in snatches here and there, with a vibroblade at hand.

In a fight, they know they could take their remaining bunkmate. They could kill him if it came to that. 

They don’t want it to come to that.

* * *

“My buddy from the _Witten_ said you’re a hard worker, don’t complain, don’t put up with shavit,” says the first mate, a Rodian named Sterll, over his shoulder. “Follow through on that and you’ll do just fine here.” He somehow manages to make it sound ominous as he weaves his way through the ship’s narrow corridors.

Boomer honestly doesn’t even remember this freighter’s name. It’s much, much smaller than the _Witten_ , so if any crewmates try to rob them again, it’s going to turn ugly quickly — there’s nowhere onboard to get any space. But the _Witten_ ’s head cook swore up and down that his friend Sterll ran a tight ship, and Boomer has to get farther from the Core.

“Here’s you,” says Sterll, and he pops open the doors to the set of quarters. They open on a tiny space — just big enough for two bunks, one stacked on top of the other, a trunk or two, and for a bipedal person to walk in between. “You’ll be in with Kirin. All right there, Kirin?”

A human leans over from their sprawl across the top bunk, datapad balanced in hand. “Doing fine. Who’s this?”

“New crew, Fern.” (Boomer isn’t good at aliases.) “They’re joining up for the trip out to Taris. Report in at 0400 and show them the ropes.”

“Sure thing,” Kirin says absently, clearly already back into reading the datapad.

Sterll rolls his eyes. “He’ll teach you what you need to know,” he said to Boomer. “Talk your ear off about holonovels, too. 0400, cargo bay.”

“I’ll be there,” Boomer promises, and Sterll leaves them to their new bunk.

After a minute, Kirin leans over the edge of his bunk again. He squints at Boomer. “You look familiar.”

Boomer smiles easily.

“I’ve got one of those faces,” they say.

* * *

Taris is one unfathomably large city, endlessly sprawling across the entire planet. Boomer visited Coruscant on assignment once, when they were fresh off Kamino, and this city is the biggest they’ve seen since. They catch glimpses through the nearest viewscreen while hefting crates in the cargo bay. They see some new-construction towers with soft, rounded edges, rising amid enormous stretches of ruins overgrown with vegetation. It’s like what Coruscant might look like after centuries of neglect and with a purple ocean.

Once the freighter drops into the long docking tunnel that will lead to its destination, the handful of gleaming towers and the unending destruction give way to underground darkness. An overpowering sour stench invades the ship the moment that the bay doors are opened in the underground spaceport. It’s rot, pure and simple.

Boomer has a strong stomach but even they cough, eyes watering. Sterll laughs sharply. “First time on Taris, eh? Welcome to the Undercity,” he says. 

Boomer works with the crew to offload the ship’s cargo onto a couple of patched-together landspeeders waiting for them. The crew is studiously not invited to ask questions about the crates they’re arranging. 

The spaceport is the most decrepit Boomer has visited in a long time. There are cracks and slime trails running down the walls. In the corner of the bay they’ve docked in, someone furry is welding on a ship that looks like it was pieced together by someone else who chopped up four ships from wildly different eras and then crushed the parts together.

“Coming, newbie?” Sterll calls to Boomer. 

Boomer turns away from watching the landspeeders careen away with the cargo balanced precariously. Most of the crew are pulling on jackets or fluffing up their fur, gathering at the ship’s open bay doors.

“Sterll. Really?” asks Hua’ilk, a Bothan who has particularly not warmed to Boomer so far. 

“We’ll give ‘em the Undercity tour,” says Sterll, grinning, and Boomer finds themself facing five out of the ship’s other six crewmembers. They all look anticipatory. 

As far as Boomer can tell, anyway; Boomer still hasn’t figured out how to read the two Gands’ impenetrable insectile expressions.

“Where’s Kirin?” Boomer asks, and there’s a burst of laughter from the group.

“The professor’s gonna sit in his quarters and read the whole time we’re on-planet,” says Hua’ilk. “Thinks he’s better than us.”

Boomer had been planning to use their downtime to get some shuteye, after long days and nights of watchfulness with a furious bunkmate on the _Witten_. But if they’re going to be onboard a small ship with these five people, this is the better plan. Boomer can’t do another two weeks where they spend every waking moment trying not to (a) fall asleep or (b) get shivved.

They say, to a roar of approval, “What’re we waiting for?” 

+

Boomer doesn’t know much about Taris. It used to be a rival to Coruscant, they think, a long time ago, but it’s a faded city-world now. 

The underside of the city itself looks much like Boomer’s first impression of the spaceport: practical construction, rundown and pieced together out of patchwork. It’s fully underground and lit by colorful illuminated signs and by hovering glowbulbs that give off a dull orange-yellow light. The ceilings are close; pipes and transport tubes run along it, so low that Boomer could stretch up a hand and touch them. 

The main thoroughfare and the shopfronts and homes look like they were carved straight out of bedrock. The road, such as it is, is barely wide enough for two gravcarts to squeeze past each other; there’s a steady crowd of foot traffic, people pushing their way through. Vendors have set up shop along a few of the wider sections, wares spread out on dusty blankets. 

One person’s selection of trinkets includes four battered stormtrooper helmets. Their black eyes stare at Boomer accusatorily.

“Is there an Imp presence here?” Boomer asks.

Hua’ilk gives them a look like they’re an idiot. Jagaf, an Ithorian who’d introduced herself with a bow, takes pity on them. “They’ve been on-world for a long time,” she says. Her voice is a series of low grunts, translated into Basic and spoken aloud by the serene voice of her translator device. “Taris was part of the Council of Neutral Systems during the war. The Republic had a base in the Upper City; they said they were here to guard against Separatist attacks.” 

Hua’ilk snorts. “Changed their tone awful fast once the Emperor came to power. Those bases house a couple Imp garrisons now. Wouldn’t be caught dead down here, though.”

Still, Boomer gives the stormtrooper helmets a wide berth.

+

It takes a while but Boomer does eventually realize that they’re getting stared at.

(And not necessarily for good reasons, even if Hua’ilk came back from the bar once with the news that a woman sitting there was asking about Boomer, and the entire crew cracked up and gave them shavit.)

It’s been weeks since they’ve caught anyone doing a double-take at the sight of their face. People tend not to look that closely at them at all; they’re just one more tall human who needs a haircut, and they’re big enough that people generally tend not to try to kriff with them.

But, on what is in retrospect maybe the sixth or seventh time somebody looks at them and then looks away, Boomer finally realizes they’re one of three humans in this packed cantina, and one of the only humans they’ve seen in the entire Undercity. 

They have an idea of what the answer’s going to be, but they lean over to Hua’ilk — who pulls his sabacc cards in close to his chest and gives Boomer a comically unsteady, dirty look — and ask, “What’s the Upper City like?”

Hua’ilk’s sitting on their better side, but they still have to listen closely for the answer. Environments full of loud background noise always require an extra level of concentration when it comes to conversation. “Fancy,” Hua’ilk says, like it’s a four-letter word. He tosses a credit chip toward the pot and swears when he drunkenly misses. 

“Human,” Sterll says dryly.

“There is more freedom of movement between Upper and Lower than there once was,” says Flori Haakil, one of the two Gands. “Haakil has not visited the Upper City but now could, if he wished to.”

“Why would you wish to, though,” says Jagaf dryly through her translator, to laughter from the table. With great deliberation, she places a handful of credit chips in the center of the table. “Call.”

“Too rich for my blood,” says Boomer lightly, and they toss down their cards. “Fold.”

Jagaf makes a deep, rude-sounding noise, and Sterll laughs and says something Boomer can’t make out over the general buzz of noise in the cantina. When Boomer turns to him, Sterll repeats himself. “Anyone ever tell you you’re terrible at sabacc, Fern?”

“Once or twice,” Boomer says with a grin. 

“Sterrl,” begins the other Gand crewmember, sounding concerned even through his respirator, and then violence suddenly erupts behind them. Two Quarrens, arguing half in Basic and half in a language Boomer doesn’t speak, burst up from the adjoining table, trying to throttle each other. The musicians screech to a halt and the cantina roars.

“Hey, hey hey!” Sterll objects, making a grab for the pitcher of ale in the middle of their crew’s table, but it’s too late; the combatants whack the table as they continue struggling and the ale tips over. Sterll shouts something after them.

The fight ends before money can start passing hands in the bets that are clearly taking place — the cantina’s enormous Trandoshan bouncer puts a swift, brutal end to it by throwing both fighters out into the street.

The band begins to play again and conversations pick up as if nothing happened. With a chorus of disgusted noises, Boomer’s crew mops up spilled lomin ale.

Boomer rises from their seat. “What, more human food already?” Hua’ilk says wearily. Apparently the smell of fried rygg noodles makes him queasy, which, had Boomer known, would have influenced their food choices when they ordered earlier. Hua’ilk’s apparently not over it yet.

“Getting a new pitcher,” Boomer says, and Jagaf gives a little cheer. 

“Not saying hi to your admirer?” Sterll says, amusement clear in his voice.

“I could,” says Boomer cheerfully, to laughter from the table, and they leave the crew to mop up.

The cantina’s packed and it takes a few tries to get the bartender’s attention. 

A voice at Boomer’s elbow says, “Don’t see many of your kind down here.” They blink and glance over. 

There’s a Roonan seated on the barstool beside them, with an enormous glass of something fizzy and a datapad at hand. The stranger is swaying just a little bit on their stool and their enormous, pupil-less blue eyes are trained on Boomer. Their mouth is set in a neutral line beneath the deep wrinkles carved into their gray skin. Boomer thinks they’re drunk, but their expression is hard to read.

“My kind?” 

“Humans. You slumming it?”

There’s a familiar laugh over Boomer’s shoulder. Hua’ilk is staggering in the general direction of the ‘freshers, and he says, “Nah, they’re on our crew.” From the exaggerated wink and hard nudge that Hua’ilk gives Boomer as he passes, the Roonan must be the woman who’d been asking about them earlier.

She’s attractive, but Boomer’s more invested in building relationships with their new crew — in the fact that Hua’ilk, who’d been the most standoffish, seems to be coming around, even if it took three mugs of lomin ale to get there.

“Just buying a round for my crew,” Boomer says with an easy smile.

The Roonan glances after Hua’ilk, for a moment. “The Bothan said ‘they’,” she says, and Boomer’s not entirely sure if she’s talking to them or to herself.

“He did,” they say, passing a couple of credit chips to the bartender in exchange for their pitcher of beer.

“Huh,” says the Roonan. When Boomer looks back at her, full pitcher in hand, they find that she’s studying her datapad. She raises her gaze to their face. “Missing eyebrow and all.”

Boomer starts to feel a very late twinge, which cranks into full-blown alarm as the Roonan woman reaches for her blaster. 

She swears as the blaster gets caught on her belt, and Boomer goes with what they’ve got: they dump their pitcher of beer on her.

“Hey! Take it outside!” the bartender bellows, but it’s too late for that. 

“This is _my_ bounty; back off!” the Roonan woman roars. She throws a kick that Boomer just barely angles their thigh in the way of, then finally manages to draw her blaster. 

They slam the heavy pitcher into her blaster-hand, then crack it over her head and she goes down in a drunken heap.

Boomer waits for conversations to pick back up again the way that they did after the brawl earlier, but the silence in the cantina remains absolute. Every eye in the place is on them. 

They look to the table where their crew is sitting. They’re all still seated and staring — there’s no help coming from that quarter.

Boomer looks up sharply at a flash of movement, with a split second to think it’s someone drawing a blaster to claim what’s apparently a bounty on them, but it’s Hua’ilk, pushing through the crowd from the ‘fresher and stopping dead when he finds Boomer standing at the bar with an empty cracked pitcher in hand and an insensate, drenched Roonan bounty hunter crumpled at their feet. 

“The hell’d you _do_?” Hua’ilk demands.

Boomer puts down the pitcher. They reach over and grab the Roonan’s datapad off the bar, and draw their own blaster. 

With a blaster in hand, nobody makes a move to stop them.

They start to jog once they’re outside.

+

When they reach the spaceport, there’s a decrepit freighter starting to light up its repulsorlifts. The crewmember working the ramp seems surprised to have a prospective passenger at all, much less a last minute one, but accepts most of Boomer’s ill-gotten advance from their last ship as payment.

Boomer may not know much about ships but they’ve spent enough time on well-maintained freighters, thanks to Cog and Leeadra, to recognize when one is falling down around the crew’s ears. But it holds together on the launch through the planet’s subterranean tunnels, and Boomer finds their way to the quarters, where three bemused crew members show them to a spare bunk.

Boomer exchanges a few greetings and then climbs into the bunk with the Roonan bounty hunter’s datapad. Enough time hasn’t lapsed for it to lock itself yet. 

The hunter left it open on an entry about Boomer. The entry doesn’t say much. There’s an Imperial bounty on their head — they’re wanted dead. It identifies them as CT-2726 and lists known aliases, associates, and physical details. Target and Bash are listed as known associates. Struts isn’t, which is hopefully good for him. Lock isn’t listed either, and Boomer can’t begin to guess what that means. There’s a holo image of a clone trooper’s face — it’s not actually Boomer’s face. 

They flip through other bounties in the database and then, on their first trip to the galley, they toss the datapad into the nearest trash compactor chute when no one’s looking.

They jump ship at the first stop.

* * *

In a cantina on Bandomeer, the power is on the fritz and a wall of flimsi scraps has replaced the familiar holo-boards that Boomer checks for work in watering holes across the Outer Rim. 

They pause over an entry in messy handwriting with familiar Basic syntax, advertising a swift ship and discreet service.

It wasn’t necessarily written by who they immediately think of, Boomer reminds themself. There are plenty of captains with fast freighters and an idiosyncratic grasp of Basic looking for work in this part of space.

They stand in front of the board until the drunk patron at the nearest table starts to grumble about them blocking the light. Before they can second guess themself, or think about what they’re doing, they grab the flimsi scrap and stuff it deep into their pocket.

* * *

The farther out they go, the easier it is to hide what they are, at least in theory.

In practice, they wind up hefting cargo on a star cruiser that stops on Phindar in the Mandalorian sector, which is probably their worst idea yet. The merchant ship docks at a fuel and service facility that’s run by subcontractors but mostly serves Imperial starships. 

The station, Boomer realizes as they take their first step off their own ship, is crawling with Imperials. 

Boomer turns on their heel and develops a sudden case of Dressellian flu. They’re relatively sure the first mate doesn’t believe them — they haven’t been sick a day in their life, and their acting skills undoubtedly suffer for it — but she doesn’t challenge them either, and they spend the ship’s two days on-station quarantined in their quarters. 

It’s funny that they once thought they had too much free time, on that trip out to the Sith temple in the Unknown Regions. Then, there was gear to organize, training to work on, socks to knit, a captain to flirt with, squadmates to look in on. There’s nothing to do on this freighter now but lie in their bunk, stare at the ceiling, and try to sleep. 

A lifetime in the GAR doesn’t lend itself to possessions. All Boomer has to show for it is a series of tattoos, a battered body, and a flimsi scrap that, even if it wasn’t written by Leeadra Rennick, is a tangible reminder of a time they can’t get back. 

They think about the look on the face of TK-287 as he charged straight into a turbolaser blast on Antar. About Cog, kneeling in front of Knight Tai with his hands bound behind his back; about how plainly he and Knight Tai had loved each other, and they'd spent their final moments trying to kill each other before Knight Tai succeeded. About crouching and prepping charges as fast as Boomer's hands could set them, knowing they’d be blowing apart row upon row of clones. Target, growing quieter and quieter in the months after they struck down Knight Tai on Selvaris. Their old nightmares of white armor and black eyes, troopers falling like dominos. The Clawdite’s mocking words after they stole dozens of clones for organs, like old speeders broken down for parts, and no one noticed. 

They imagine they can hear the tramp of stormtrooper boots through the hull. 

When they stagger to the galley after the ship leaves port, the ship’s first mate takes one look at them and says, “Stang, maybe you _did_ need quarantining.”

* * *

Planets blur together. 

There’s one with green skies. Another that survives beneath a constant electrical storm. Multiple fueling depots and space stations, every one more nondescript than the last. The ships are much the same. 

They don’t sleep much. The galaxy has taken on an air of unreality. 

In a mining outpost surrounded by craggy mountains, they’ve just spent the last of their big credit chips on a skewer of puffer pig bacon from a street vendor when raised voices finally catch their attention. They glance across the bazaar to find three toughs — two human, one Trandoshan — surrounding someone smaller. The knot of angry voices has gathered outside a shopfront advertising commlink services.

Someone says something about a thief.

“I’m not a thief!” insists a high, young voice. There’s a blur of movement as one of the humans reaches for the person they’re all looming over, like the nearby mountain range looms over this precariously perched town. “Hey! Stop!”

Boomer glances around. There are a few tight expressions on people passing, but no one steps toward the scuffle — and it _is_ a scuffle now, with swearing and the sound of a blow landing.

Boomer puts their skewer down on top of the vendor’s counter. “Hey,” they call, and nobody pays them any mind. They start to walk across the bazaar, then break into a jog at a high-pitched cry.

“ _Hey_ ,” they say sharply, and they grab the Trandoshan’s shoulder. The Trandoshan hisses, turns around, and throws a punch that snaps Boomer's head back. Boomer staggers back a step with the bloom of pain.

Someone small and green-skinned, wearing rags, is curled into a ball at the three toughs’ feet. One of the humans kicks the little ball. It’s hard to tell with their arms covering their face, but it looks they’re like a Rodian, and from their size, probably a child.

Boomer’s jaw sets. “Leave ‘em alone,” they say. “If they stole from you, call for security.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with you,” says one of the humans. “Kriff off.” They’re built like a heavy grav-lifter and they tower over the person cowering at their feet. 

“Better listen to him, stranger,” says the other human. “You’re not wanted here.” 

The man who’d told Boomer to kriff off kicks the accused thief again. He’s grinning.

Boomer drives a boot into the man’s instep. While the stranger’s still just starting to stumble to the side, his leg going out from under him, Boomer knees him in the solar plexus and then cracks him over the back of the neck with a well-placed elbow. 

The big man hits the dirt in a cloud of dust, moaning. The other human and the Trandoshan turn to look at Boomer. 

The Rodian child unfurls from their protective ball, lunges, and bites into the human’s shin with a furious snarl. 

The human is hopping about trying to shake off the child, screaming, “Get her off! Get her off!!” but she has sunk her teeth in and hangs on viciously. 

The Trandoshan doesn’t even twitch — they take a heavy swing at Boomer that Boomer ducks.

“Kosk, you useless sack of skin!” the human shouts, finally sending the little attacker flying. Boomer glances back to check on the girl but she’s already popping back up to her feet and she is, wisely, staying well behind them.

Boomer puts both hands up, palms out. “We can all walk away here.”

“No, we can’t!” the human says incredulously. “That little turd _bit_ me!” 

Boomer doesn’t know what the kid silently does behind them, but they know it’s something cheeky from the reaction — the human shouts with fury and lunges for her, and Boomer shoves them back. 

It happens fast. Boomer moves on muscle memory, on instinct. They block a punch with their forearm, get shoved back, take a glancing blow from the Trandoshan’s tail, and crack the human, hard, in the face with the heel of their palm. The Trandoshan is hissing, both humans — including the one who Boomer knocked down, who’s still curled around his midsection on the ground — are yelling, and Boomer’s distantly aware of more alarmed shouts rising up in the bazaar around them.

Boomer could do a hell of a lot more damage with a blaster rifle or a block of detonite than they can with their fists and their feet, but they’re combat-trained and there’s a kid somewhere behind them. They lower their shoulder and hit the Trandoshan hard, driving them back a few paces — and then there’s the low hum of a vibroblade and the human is lunging in too close.

Boomer flinches back from the slice of heat along their left side. The human freezes, blood still pouring from their nose, then says, “Kriff, sec force is coming; come on, come on!” and drags the Trandoshan and the limping other human with them as they sprint.

Boomer staggers back, hand pressed to their bloody side, and then slowly sinks down against the shopfront’s door.

A small green face appears. The Rodian girl grabs Boomer’s arm in both her hands and tugs, but it’s like a Kowakian monkey-lizard trying to haul a drunk bantha to its feet. Boomer grunts, keeping their other hand pressed to their side. “It’s okay,” they tell the girl. “You go.” 

She shakes her head furiously and pulls harder, but Boomer’s through with running. They’re too tired. “Go on,” they say, and she hovers for a long moment, then her head rises sharply and she takes off.

As she rounds the corner and vanishes deeper into the bazaar, a tall, statuesque human in the uniform of the mining company’s security forces comes striding through. Their hair is coiled into thick braids and piled on top of their head. They stand over Boomer, who can feel blood beginning to sluggishly seep around their fingers, and they sigh gustily. “Really?” asks the security officer with the great hair. “You couldn’t have just run?”

“Thought I’d try sitting for a while,” Boomer says.

“How’s that working out for you?” asks the officer dryly, and Boomer shrugs, then winces.

+

Officer Meng isn’t a bad sort, it turns out. She isn’t about to pay for a doctor out of her own paycheck, but after she hauls Boomer back to the mining colony’s tiny jail, she drops the forcefield and tosses some medical supplies into the cell with them so they can at least make a cursory attempt at cleaning and bandaging their stab wound.

She’s refreshingly honest about her motivations.

“All I want,” Officer Meng says, “is to get you out of this cell. The longer you’re in here, the longer my shift goes on because I’m not allowed to leave the office untended while there’s a prisoner.” She’s slumped in a chair on the opposite side of the forcefield, hand pressed to her temple like she has a bad headache. “I don’t care what you do as long as you get out of my jurisdiction.”

Boomer hasn’t actually been in a jail cell before, but this one is a small, relatively clean space with a bunk and a ‘fresher. They were tossed into worse closets while being disciplined in training on Kamino. Jacket off and tunic hung around their neck, they discard the last of the antiseptic patches and reach for the bandage with adhesive edges.

“You were more talkative in the bazaar,” says Officer Meng. “I’d prefer not to talk to myself all night, but I will.”

Boomer peels the adhesive backing off the bandage. It’s in no way a life-threatening injury and the bleeding has slowed to a trickle, but it’s deep and their side is throbbing.

“Look,” says Officer Meng. She leans forward in her chair, elbows resting on her knees. She looks almost as exhausted as Boomer feels. “The company’s got strong feelings on usefulness, and you? You don’t fit them. You got yourself stabbed; you’re not in any shape to go work in the mines. You don’t have a ticket off-world and you don’t have the creds to buy one. You’ve got no ID and that name you gave me is a piss-poor fake. If somebody doesn’t come get you, you’re gonna sit in that cell til the carildra come home.”

This isn’t a scenario for name, rank, and trooper number. Boomer tapes down the edges of the bandage and starts to painfully ease their bloody tunic back down again.

“You know you had this on you when I booked you,” says the officer. ‘This’ is a scrap of flimsi — one that Boomer had begun to forget was buried deep in their pocket, worn so soft over time it didn’t even crinkle anymore. Officer Meng is holding it up between two fingers, eyebrows raised. “There’s a comm code.”

Boomer found that ad tacked to the wall in a seedy cantina on Bandomeer. It could have been left by one of any number of ship captains. The comm code doesn’t necessarily go to a message service for the _Jiri Wayfarer_ ; in fact it probably doesn’t. They’d had a feeling about it, but if they’ve learned anything over the last year, it’s that they can’t trust their own feelings. 

Even if it somehow is Leeadra, it’s hard to imagine that Leeadra would welcome being asked to bail out a clone ey barely knew — a clone who betrayed and assassinated their own Jedi. There was no reasoning behind what Boomer had done; there was nothing but sudden, incalculable rage and certainty. Dax had vanished immediately after the battle, and the one or two times he’d reached out via the Force while Boomer was still serving, Boomer had rebuffed him viciously. Boomer hasn’t been near another Force user in months. What if it happened again? 

Leeadra should stay lightyears away.

“I don’t know them,” Boomer says. It’s hollow; it’s easy.

“Really? Because the captain knew you,” says Officer Meng, and Boomer’s tired but their heart plummets into their ill-fitting boots. “I left a message saying I had somebody calling themself Cog locked up and I got a very loud comm back within an hour. Captain Rennick will reach Vanquo in ten hours.”

“No,” says Boomer.

“You’re leaving this planet,” says Officer Meng peaceably, “and I found someone to do it.” She rises from her chair with a slap to both her thighs. She looks very pleased with herself. “You’re welcome.”

You’re welcome. 

“Ey shouldn’t come,” Boomer says.

“It’s a little late for that,” she says, and she lightly taps the forcefield twice. It buzzes against her hand — _bzzt bzzt_. “I’d worry more about making yourself presentable so somebody’ll actually take you on their ship.” She tosses a look over at them as she walks out. “You’re a mess.”

She’s not wrong there.

Boomer’s never been a worrier, they remind themself. There’s no sense in sitting and worrying when there’s literally not a thing they can do — when they’re cooling their heels in a cell with nothing but the clothes on their back and a handful of used antiseptic patches. 

They lean their head back against the wall and they breathe, they count the throbs of their heartbeat in their side, and they wait.

+

Officer Meng doesn’t say goodbye before she goes off-shift; it’s another officer, one who doesn’t bother to introduce themself, who eventually arrives to drop the forcefield.

Boomer doesn’t know how long it’s been. They couldn’t sleep. They can’t actually remember the last time they got a good night’s sleep. The officer unceremoniously hauls them out of their cell, dumps them into a landspeeder, and shuttles them over to the town’s tiny spaceport.

Boomer still doesn’t think this is a good idea, but they’re out of options. There’s dried blood crusted under their nails and their eye feels tender from the Trandoshan’s punch. They’re tired. And, knowing Leeadra, they’re unlikely to escape this even if they try to get away from the mining company security officer.

So they don’t try.

At the spaceport, the officer mistrustfully holds out the personal effects that were confiscated from Boomer: their holdout blaster, a few coins, a stylus.

Boomer takes the stylus and the coins. They’re not carrying a blaster to meet Leeadra. “It’s all yours,” they say, and the officer doesn’t look thrilled to be left with a cheap old holdout but sighs and tucks it away. 

“Whatever,” they say, clearly bored. “This was your final warning, blah blah; if you come back to Vanquo again, you’ll face a trial for disturbing the peace and trespassing.”

“Sure,” they say, and they watch the familiar neat little freighter make its final landing approach with something that feels like dull resignation.

+

The ramp lowers with the smooth whine of well-maintained hydraulics. 

Captain Leeadra Rennick comes barreling down the ramp but stops dead in eir tracks when ey has taken just a few steps across the docking bay floor. “ _Boomer?_ ” 

Boomer’s not sure they’ve ever seen Leeadra genuinely surprised before. Leeadra always felt like ey was at least five steps ahead of the rest of them. Ey is unmistakably staring, blue headtails whipping about eir shoulders.

There’s no getting out of this now. Boomer carefully rises off the crate they’ve been perched on and says, “Uh, hi.”

Leeadra starts to move again. Boomer has a split second to begin to realize that ey isn’t going to stop this time, and then Leeadra launches emself at them. 

Leeadra has nothing on Boomer when it comes to sheer mass, but the two of them are roughly the same height and ey slams into them. Boomer yelps, hot pain radiating down their side, and staggers backward with an armful of Nautolan freighter captain. 

Leeadra immediately jerks back, but before ey can let go, Boomer gets a handful of eir jacket. 

“...Boomer?”

Boomer bends down and buries eir face in Leeadra’s cool shoulder.

Leeadra says something in a language that Boomer doesn’t speak and pulls Boomer close, one strong, slender hand holding the back of their neck. 

Boomer can’t remember the last time someone really held them. It honestly might have been Leeadra emself, when the two of them said a private goodbye above Selvaris. There wasn’t a whole lot of talking involved in that farewell, though Leeadra had taken the opportunity to slyly slip them eir comm code.

‘It’s been fun,’ Boomer had said later, in front of the rest of the squad. ‘Look you up the next time I’m in the Outer Rim?’

‘See you again,’ Leeadra had said, with easy certainty.

Now Boomer sort of laughs, and sags. 

Leeadra squawks and staggers for a second, then pushes up against their weight, arm tightening around their waist. Boomer needs to stop dragging em down, but their knees don’t get the memo.

Leeadra gives them time. It’s an overwhelming kindness.

+

They don’t know how long it’s been when Leeadra squeezes their waist and says in their ear, “We go.”

They let Leeadra turn them around and frog-march them up the ramp of the _Jiri Wayfarer_. Ey guides them past several neat stacks of crates in the cargo bay and straight up to the cockpit. 

It’s surreal to be back on this ship; one of the last places they were with their brothers and Knight Tai. It looks like nothing has changed, even though they know it’s not true. Everything has changed.

They have to tell Leeadra.

“I have to tell you,” Boomer starts.

“Sit,” Leeadra says in no uncertain terms, letting go of them over the co-pilot’s seat, and Boomer drops like their knees have been cut out under them. 

Leeadra climbs into the pilot’s chair and immediately begins the sequence for takeoff. “We go,” ey says again, as ey works. “Okay?”

Boomer sinks into the chair and says, “Okay.” 

They spent so much time sitting in this chair, and in ones like it. The roar of engines, of a familiar voice arguing with spaceport ground control, of hands tapping on controls — it tugs at them. 

They blink and the _Jiri Wayfarer_ is leaving atmosphere. The blackness of space, studded with white stars, looms in front of the viewscreen. It’s cold. 

Boomer knuckles at their eyes and turns to the side. Leeadra is intent on the hyperdrive computer. Without looking up, Leeadra asks, “Where you going?”

Boomer’s profound lack of an answer to the question must come through, because Leeadra immediately looks over. Boomer was never entirely sure how much of eir facility with emotions was Force sensitivity and how much was eir sensory headtails, or if ey would even make a distinction between the two.

Leeadra tilts eir head. “You say ‘ride,’ ” ey says.

Boomer rouses themself to try to give the question consideration. It doesn’t seem very important. “Short jump’s fine.” 

“Where you go?” Leeadra asks again, and Boomer says, “Anywhere.”

Leeadra swears under eir breath and pulls the hyperdrive lever. The stars elongate into lines, the deckplates shiver underfoot, and the _Jiri Wayfarer_ make the jump to lightspeed.

“Stay,” Leeadra orders, and ey leaves the cockpit. 

There’s something overwhelming in being given clear, distinct orders; ones that Boomer can trust won’t hurt anyone who shouldn’t be hurt. They drift again.

They’re woken by Leeadra’s voice. Ey has a brightly-colored blanket, which ey throws across Boomer’s cold lap, and a basic medkit in hand. “Tunic,” ey says, crouching at Boomer’s knee, with a gesture that might mean up and might mean off. 

Boomer shakes themself, and steels themself. “Hang on,” they say. “Stop. I have to tell you what happened.”

“Everybody knows what happened,” Leeadra says sharply. “Clones went spaced.”

“No,” says Boomer. 

They haven’t had to say this out loud, before. 

“We got orders to kill the Jedi because they were traitors. I didn’t hesitate.” 

Leeadra neatly sits back on eir heels. Ey studies Boomer. The only sign of any strong feeling is in eir hands, holding onto the medkit in eir lap so tightly that eir knuckles are turning a paler shade of blue. “You kill her?”

The drumbeat certainty of _kill the traitor Jedi_. 

Feeling nothing but duty and fury as they trained a blaster on their commanding officer. Knight Tai’s face and the flash of the lightsaber as she struck the final blow that could have cut them in half (but, conspicuously, didn’t — that knocked them out instead). 

“Yeah,” says Boomer. 

Leeadra’s mouth goes tight but otherwise, eir expression betrays nothing. “You want to?”

“Then,” they say. “I couldn’t tell anything was wrong until — after. Much later.” 

They’d do anything to take it all back.

“What changes?”

“I don’t know,” Boomer says honestly. “I went down in a live-fire training exercise and I just — knew. I was…” 

Words can’t explain how it felt. It was like having a star cruiser dropped on them. Maybe they don’t have to describe it. Leeadra can, unfortunately for em, probably feel it. See it? Taste it? Boomer was never entirely clear on how their abilities worked.

They’re letting themself get sidetracked.

“I, uh—” 

They’ve been thinking of it in different ways. They left, they escaped, they took off. 

Their sense of time is skewed, in the moment. They don’t fully know how long it’s been now. Weeks, at least. They haven’t, they know now, been doing great. They’re dizzy with it. But there’s one word they’ve been avoiding that accurately describes what they did. 

“I deserted.”

Leeadra is silent. Boomer doesn’t know what ey’s thinking. They never really have; it was always part of Leeadra’s charm — eir utter unpredictability. 

Boomer’s adrenaline is fading, and with it, the last of their energy. Their wound is starting to throb again. 

“Want to kill?” Leeadra finally asks, gesturing at emself.

“ _No_ ,” says Boomer, almost before ey has finished.

Ey points to emself again. “Tell Empire?”

“No.”

“Okay. So—” Leeadra points at the medkit ey is still holding, then gives them a meaningful look. 

Boomer hesitates. It somehow feels more dangerous, being patched up; like the two of them are both going to let down their guard and suddenly Boomer won’t be able to trust their own mind again. Like they’re going to reach out and snap Leeadra’s neck and then congratulate themself for it.

They squeeze their unsteady hands into fists in their lap. “I don’t know what would happen with a Force user who’s not a Jedi.” The squad didn’t all turn on Dax, and that’s something Boomer has been comforted by, but Dax was, in the moment, fighting Knight Tai too.

“Boomer,” says Leeadra, with a note of irritation that’s more reassuring than any solicitousness could have been. “I feel. You wanna hurt me?” Ey presses a hand to eir own shoulder, where Boomer suspects one of eir hearts is. “ _I feel_. I fight.”

Boomer thinks ey is talking about eir abilities, but even with that advantage, Boomer doesn’t know if Leeadra could react fast enough. It was like throwing a switch, last time. Shock, seeing Cog force-cuffed on his knees in front of Knight Tai, to immediate, rock-solid certainty that they needed to eradicate her, in the blink of an eye. 

They’re well-trained and they’re bigger than Leeadra. They don’t need a blaster or detonite to be capable of doing harm.

Leeadra is visibly bristling. “Doubt me?”

“Not you,” says Boomer, ragged. 

Leeadra’s scowl softens. Ey sits in silence, for a moment, the two of them looking at each other. Then ey says something in that watery-sounding language and reaches out. With a no-nonsense air, ey puts eir hand on Boomer’s knee. 

The sky doesn’t fall. Boomer doesn’t suddenly know again with absolute certainty that all Force users are traitors. 

Leeadra’s face sets in obvious resolve. Ey says firmly, “Talk later.” Ey taps Boomer’s knee hard. “Tunic now.”

It’s clearly an order. Before Boomer can really even think about it, they’re starting to sit up. “We never did this in the cockpit before.” The weak joke slips out automatically as they’re shouldering their way out of their jacket.

“Of course not, unprofessional,” says Leeadra. “Off!”

They painfully peel their tunic away from their side and pull it off over their head, with Leeadra’s assistance. 

Leeadra pauses, hands stilling, a few tentacles twisting over eir shoulder, and Boomer realizes ey has probably seen the lightsaber scars. 

Boomer feels — empty. Drained. Somewhere distant, they think they feel shame pressing on their chest like a physical weight. They breathe shallowly and don’t meet Leeadra’s eyes. They reach down and start clumsily picking at the edge of the tape that’s haphazardly holding their old bandage on. 

All at once, there are blue fingers there, too, and Leeadra bats their hands away and pulls off the bandage with one merciless yank on the tape.

It turns out, unsurprisingly, that both of them are ‘rip the bandage off all at once’ people. 

Boomer sits stiffly as Leeadra presses two painkillers, a canteen, and a protein bar on them, and then does a vastly more effective job of cleaning the stab wound than Boomer was able to do on their own. 

They’re exhausted enough that their eyes slip shut a couple of times, but every time they snap back to attention, nothing has changed; the ship is still streaking through hyperspace and they’re still looking at the top of Leeadra’s head, and Leeadra’s hands are still ruthless with the stinging disinfectant, and Boomer still doesn’t want to hurt em.

“Hey,” objects Leeadra, and Boomer’s knee gets pinched. They jerk awake again. 

“No more sleep,” Leeadra says. “I can’t carry.” Ey finishes taping the fresh bacta patch over their ribs, then collects the blanket, steps back, and says, “Up.” 

Leeadra is looking at them expectantly, so Boomer takes eir offered hands and lurches to their feet. They sway, once they’re up. The cockpit wavers around them. Leeadra drapes the blanket around their shoulders and pushes them forward with both hands on their back. 

“Five minutes, then sleep,” Leeadra coaxes, steering them along the corridor. Ey nudges them through a door, and Boomer, after a long moment, realizes where they are.

Boomer has never in their life had a whole berth to themself. The last time they were onboard the _Jiri Wayfarer_ , they shared this empty set of quarters with Dax.

Leeadra pauses for a moment, then says a resounding, “ _Nope_ ,” and pulls them back out into the corridor. Ey herds them somewhere else. They’re so tired.

Boomer blinks and opens their eyes to the sound of swearing. They apparently started listing to the side and, beneath their arm, Leeadra is struggling to shove them back up on their feet.

“Boomer,” ey says loudly, “awake. _Stop that._ ”

Boomer pulls their legs back under themself. Leaning heavily on Leeadra, they stagger across the deck and collapse half-on, half-off a soft bunk. Leeadra makes a sharp sound behind them and lifts first one of Boomer’s legs into the bed, then the other, then yanks off their boots.

Boomer is vaguely aware of Leeadra moving around the room; footsteps and things rustling, and em muttering to emself.

With an all-out effort, Boomer pushes back up and mumbles, “Don’t sleep here.” It’s important, they know, even if it’s too hard to remember why the thought of it makes their blood run cold.

“No, no. Work to do.” Something soft and warm is drawn up over them. Someone shoves their head back down. “ _Sleep_.”

When footsteps move away from the bed again, Boomer falls.

* * *

Their feet and hands are cold. The warm, soft weight pressing down on them gets a little more insistent. A voice buzzes but their limbs are impossibly heavy, made of ferrocrete. They sink again.

* * *

Boomer slowly realizes they’re conscious with the vague idea that this isn’t the first time they’ve woken up, but this time they’re starving and they have to piss like a hungover Hutt. A ship is humming beneath them, but there’s something new: complete silence otherwise. No crying babies. No arguing crew members. No H1F1 chirping. 

They open their eyes. They’re in bed.

Specifically, they’re in Leeadra’s bed. Boomer never actually slept in this narrow bunk before, but they gleefully participated in plenty of testing new ways to fit two tall bipeds in it. 

The captain’s quarters on the _Jiri Wayfarer_ are still as cluttered as the rest of the ship is neat and tidy; boots, robes, and knicknacks scattered across the floor, the bunk, and the low table. The bedding is a different color now and there’s a chair by the bedside that Boomer doesn’t remember being there before, but the humidity is as high as Leeadra always kept it. 

They’re sweating beneath an enormous pile of blankets. They drag themself free and limp around the empty quarters on weak legs. They finally get their first good look at themself in a mirror when they’re scrubbing their hands in the ‘fresher. 

Their face is thinner than they remember it being; there are a zoneball court’s worth of dark circles under their dull eyes. Their short hair needs a wash and one side is sticking straight up in a wing. Most disconcertingly, they have a ragged full beard, thick enough that it must have grown in some time ago.

They stare at the stranger in the mirror.

They don’t know how long it’s been since they crashed out on Leeadra, but there’s no way this was just a short hyperspace jump. Their back is stiff from how long they’ve been in bed. They half-remember waking up a few times, disoriented; at least once, a voice told them to go back to sleep. Another time, they think they drank from a canteen and wolfed down a protein bar that was handed to them. They barely remember it. They were something beyond exhausted.

Their ripped-up tunic isn’t anywhere to be found and a snowball will melt on Hoth before they fit into anything that lithe, graceful Leeadra owns, so they wrap themself in the blanket that Leeadra gave them and they go in search.

Boomer shuffles gingerly down the quiet ship’s corridor, legs protesting their use. In the cockpit, the auto-pilot is on. The ship is streaking through hyperspace. Boomer stares at the two empty chairs, for a minute, and then pads back along the corridor to the galley.

Leeadra is sitting at the table with a datapad and a plate of something that looks like insects. At the shuffle of bare feet in the doorway, ey glances up.

“...Hi,” says Boomer.

“Good; alive!” chirps Leeadra. There’s a pot of caf on the warmer. Ey offers an empty mug. “Okay? Bleed?”

They take stock even as they seize on the mug gratefully, going to the counter to fill it. Their side throbs, but the pain is duller and it’s not hot in the way that would herald infection. The bacta has been doing its work. “No, it’s better,” they say. “How long was I down?” 

“Day and a half.”

 _Shavit_ , that’s a long time. “We’ve gone beyond a short jump,” they point out. 

“You’re sleep,” Leeadra says practically, shrugging. “Have a job, still. Gotta make deadline. Transport stuff for work; don’t save clones for work.” 

Boomer surprises themself by barking a hoarse, startled laugh, and Leeadra immediately smiles. The moment feels deceptively warm and normal; like Target and Dax are in the hydroponics bay and Cog is in the cockpit and Bash is fine-tuning H1F1 in his bunk and Knight Tai is meditating in her quarters, and Boomer is in the galley drinking bad caf while Leeadra cracks them up.

Leeadra pushes a ration pack and a fork across the table. “Drop off cargo, now. Two stops, two planets. A week. Can decide where you wanna go, after.”

Boomer should insist on being dropped off somewhere now. On Leeadra leaving them behind. 

They pull up the chair across from Leeadra and set the ration pack to start cooking. 

“You help, I pay you,” Leeadra continues matter-of-factly. Ey points at Boomer with the sharp stick that ey always used in place of the eating utensils Boomer is more familiar with. “You’re crew, I pay for work, not karking.”

Boomer almost chokes.

Leeadra says firmly, “Work doesn’t depend on; don’t have to—” They give a very frank hand gesture. 

“Got it,” they manage to say around the mouthful of caf they aspirated.

“Client pays me, I pay you seven percent.”

“Okay,” Boomer says, wiping their mouth with the back of their hand. The beard scratches. 

Leeadra stares at them. “What!” ey objects. “Supposed to negotiate!”

“It’s your ship, your job, and you’re doing me a favor.” ‘A favor’ does not begin to cover the depth of what Leeadra is doing, but if Boomer engages with it, they’ll have to engage with a lot of other things they’re not in any shape to deal with. “Seems fair.” The noodles inside the ration pack are starting to sizzle, and Boomer’s stomach growls, loudly, at the smell.

Leeadra is darkly muttering to emself in eir own language again, shaking eir head. “Clones,” ey says. “Don’t learn important things! Fine. Nine percent.”

“Okay,” says Boomer agreeably, and Leeadra throws up eir hands.

+

It takes methodically downing three ration packs to take the edge off their hunger. 

Leeadra just says, mildly, “Gotta get more human food,” and makes a note of something on eir ‘pad. 

Boomer remembers Hua’ilk in the cantina on Taris, making a snide remark about human food just before the bounty hunter asked her question and everything went to hell. 

Boomer lowers their fork. “There’s something else I should probably tell you,” they say.

Leeadra shoots them a deeply leery look. “What?” 

“The Empire puts a bounty on deserters.”

“How big?”

Boomer tells them the amount they saw on the hunter’s datapad, and Leeadra tilts eir head. “What you do?”

“Set off an explosion at a military training academy,” Boomer says.

Leeadra gives a crack of laughter. “You blow up Empire,” ey says. “Of course. Okay. Other troops desert, bounty’s same?”

“No,” Boomer says, naming the lower price they saw on a few other entries before they tossed the bounty hunter’s datapad down the garbage chute. 

“Hmm. Yours not too bad, but that’s better; not worth chase. Other clones have your face too. Helps, I think,” Leeadra points out. “But — ugh. Hair, eye, what’s it called. Gives away.” Ey reaches out toward Boomer’s face, across the table.

Boomer knows exactly how they’d grab Leeadra’s hand and break eir wrist if they wanted to. They flinch. 

Leeadra freezes, then carefully, telegraphing eir movements like Boomer is a wounded animal, lays eir hands flat on the table in front of emself. 

They take one deep breath, then another. “Kriff. Sorry.” They scrub their hands over their face and say again, “Sorry.”

Leeadra shakes eir head at them and says, “Hide missing hair, on-planet.” Ey slowly lifts a hand and demonstrates by drawing a finger across the smooth blue skin above eir own eye. “Bandage.”

If Leeadra’s right and the standard clone bounty is so low that it’s not worth the effort for hunters, and if the only mark that immediately distinguishes them from other clone troopers is their half-missing eyebrow (and people will think it is, Boomer knows), then filling it in whenever they’re planetside ought to do the trick.

“Okay,” agrees Boomer.

Leeadra is studying them critically. “Other hair helps, probably.” Ey gesture along eir own jaw, signifying the beard.

“Okay,” agrees Boomer, again. They mechanically scrape up the last bits of processed meat replacement and sauce from their last ration pack.

When they glance up again, Leeadra is considering them across the table.

“—Wha’?” Boomer asks, with their mouth full.

“Need a tunic,” Leeadra points out. “I don’t _complain_ —” Leeadra’s ability to make the simple tilt of eir head flirtatious is a thing of beauty, “—but cold?”

Boomer smiles reflexively. “I live to serve,” they say. In different times, they distantly realize, they probably would have flexed under the blanket they’re wearing, to make Leeadra laugh. “But a tunic would be good, yeah.”

“You shower, I make.”

“You’re going to make me a tunic?” Boomer repeats, a thread of amusement breaking through the exhaustion, and Leeadra shoos them off to the ‘fresher with instructions to leave their clothes outside.

Even a sonic shower feels like a revelation. They scrub off what feels like months of grime, letting the sonic waves pound between their shoulder blades; shake out their hair, finally clean again, and rinse their mouth out. 

It’s not likely Leeadra — who has literally no body hair — is going to have the applicable grooming supplies anyway, so they leave the beard alone and their short hair shaggy, wrap themself in a surprisingly fluffy towel, and go hunting for Leeadra.

They find em sitting in the cockpit, intent upon something ey’s doing to the pile of blanket in eir lap. There’s a pitifully small stack of folded ragged clothes in the copilot’s chair; Boomer recognizes it as their own.

“Is clean now,” Leeadra says, waving a hand at the stack of fabric. “Before—” Ey shakes eir head and pulls an epic face; one that Boomer doesn’t blame em for in the least, given the state their clothes were in. 

“Thank you,” they say. They drape the towel around their shoulders and get dressed from the waist down in threadbare, blissfully clean clothes. 

“Can’t clean tunic and jacket,” Leeadra says practically — getting stabbed is a real fabric ruiner, it turns out, “so—“ Leeadra lifts the blanket with a jazzy little gesture. Ey has hacked one big hole into the center and closed up the sides, apart from two smaller holes, with what looks suspiciously like industrial-grade wire staples. 

Boomer stares at it. Leeadra wiggles it, and Boomer surprises themself again by laughing. 

Looking terribly pleased with emself, Leeadra tosses the hideous makeshift tunic to them. “Next planet soon, many shops,” ey says. 

“Maybe.” Boomer pulls the blanket over their head, moving slowly to accommodate their injury and trying to avoid the sharp staples. “But in the meantime, I want to earn my keep. How can I be useful?”

“Most useful is sleep,” says Leeadra, eyeing them. “Still look very bad.”

“I’m awake,” says Boomer, and Leeadra sighs with great dubiousness and says, “So stupid,” and gives them datawork to look at.

+

“Come on,” says Leeadra, some interminable amount of time later. Ey jerks a headtail in the general direction of the ship’s cargo bay and main hatch. “Market.”

“I’m good,” says Boomer absently. They’ve spread a series of flimsiplast shipping receipts across the galley table and they’re checking them all against the manifests on the datapad Leeadra gave them. It’s neat and orderly. It makes sense.

Leeadra says something else. After a minute, Boomer blinks and glances up. Leeadra is watching them intently, head tilted.

“—Okay,” says Leeadra. “You stay, I go.”

“Okay,” Boomer agrees. They don’t know how long it is before Leeadra actually leaves. They’re looking at shipping manifests, numbers blurring, and before Leeadra goes, ey says something and then, “Okay?”

“Okay,” Boomer says, and eventually, after Leeadra’s long gone and their bum knee is starting to twinge from sitting in one position for so long, they finally remember that Leeadra had told them to sleep eventually.

It was a good order, they realize, feeling like a swimmer who’s trying to surface from a deep dive into dark water. They stagger to their feet and wander back through the ship, and when they tumble back into the captain’s bunk, sleep takes them mercifully quickly.

* * *

When they begin to wake up, Boomer can immediately tell that they’ve been asleep for too long again. They swear to themself, struggling up out of the blankets. There’s no sign of Leeadra but ey has left a pile of fabric on the chair beside the bed. There’s a jacket, much too large to belong to Leeadra, hung over the back of the chair. Boomer reaches out and, after hopelessly missing the first time, snags a chair leg and drags the whole stack closer to the bed on the second try.

There’s a small pouch on top, which, upon inspection, contains soap, a cheap set of sonic clippers, and generally what looks like a collection of toiletries gathered by someone who’s vaguely aware of human grooming habits but hasn’t given them any real consideration before. The pile of fabric is a full outfit’s worth of clothing, head to toe, all in practical neutrals and sturdy materials that shouldn’t garner a second look in any spaceport in the galaxy.

All, that is, except the underwear, which are also practical construction — but in an eye-searing shade of purple that shifts to an equally neon green depending on the light.

Boomer laughs so hard they almost fall out of the bunk.

+

It’s not all a perfect fit — Leeadra probably took the boots that Boomer stole on Antar for sizing, so the new ones pinch their toes, and the trousers are generous enough in the crotch that Boomer cracks up laughing again and wonders if they ought to feel flattered by Leeadra’s memory — and most of it’s clearly been bought used, but it’s all in good shape and it’s clean. 

“I’m going to pay you back,” they tell Leeadra.

“You do already,” wheezes Leeadra, who’s been leaning on the ship’s console howling with laughter for a solid 30 seconds straight at the fit of Boomer’s trousers.

* * *

Boomer moves their handful of things out of Leeadra’s bunk and into a spartan set of crew quarters — one that isn’t the set they shared with Dax the last time they were onboard. 

“Can stay with me,” Leeadra insists.

Nautolans apparently sleep much less than humans do but Leeadra will need to rest eventually, and the last thing Boomer wants is Leeadra asleep, vulnerable, tucked up against their side.

“I’ll be good here,” Boomer says with an easy smile. 

Leeadra gives them a long look that Boomer doesn’t try to decipher.

* * *

Boomer wakes after only 10 standard hours asleep, the third time. Baby steps, they figure. They get dressed, eat a ration pack, and use the supplies that Leeadra procured to take a halfhearted crack at neatening up their wild beard. The fog of exhaustion is slowly starting to lift.

Leeadra waits until Boomer has settled into the copilot’s chair, datapad and sheets of ship manifests in hand, before ey asks, “Squad?”

Boomer squints in confusion and then realizes all at once. Their stomach turns over.

They put down the datapad and turn to face Leeadra. “Bash, Target, and Dax are okay, as far as I know,” they say, and they don’t miss the way that Leeadra’s headtails instantly relax. “ _Shavit_ , I’m sorry; I should have told you.”

“It’s okay. Talking’s hard,” Leeadra says. It’s probably the understatement of the age, describing the state Boomer was in for the first few days they were on board. “Pilot?”

Boomer sets their jaw against the swell of sadness and shakes their head. “He died. That last fight.”

From Leeadra’s stillness, they think ey can read between the lines. “Oh,” ey says, finally. Ey glances out at the stars, through the viewscreen, and then says something soft in eir own language. Boomer can’t understand it but it has the sound of something rote; of a benediction. 

Boomer has been more than their fair share of angry over Cog’s loss, thanks to all those months spent being someone who feels completely alien now — someone who trained green stormtroopers and was very much Boomer but also not, all at once. It’s only more recently that they’ve been able to feel the real grief, too.

“I don’t know for sure about the others,” Boomer finally says. “I lost them all. But they survived that fight. I think they’re free now.”

“ _Good_ ,” says Leeadra fiercely, and Boomer finds themself smiling back at em, even if their expression is mostly teeth.

* * *

After that, Leeadra makes a few casual statements that leave space, and Boomer finds themself starting to fill it. Spending a few days in transit between drop locations for Leeadra’s cargo run, there isn’t much to do _but_ talk.

“The hell you do to yourself?” Leeadra demands while helping change Boomer’s bandage, and Boomer knows ey’s not asking about Boomer accidentally reopening the sealant on their wound while lifting a heavy crate in the cargo hold, given that Leeadra has already thoroughly reamed them out for that poor life choice.

“Brought my fists to a vibroblade fight,” they say, holding themself taut but trying to speak lightly, and they accept as their due the sting of the antiseptic that Leeadra applies none-too-gently.

+

“Work all the time. Don’t have to,” Leeadra says, eyeballing them across eir lapful of engine parts.

“I like keeping busy.” Boomer wiggles the hydrospanner that Leeadra placed them in charge of. Every once in a while, Leeadra asks for it and Boomer hands it to em. It’s not the busiest morning they’ve ever spent, but they can spare Leeadra an extra reach, at least, and learn more about in-flight ship maintenance.

“Find other stuff. Meditate,” Leeadra suggests, and Boomer’s not sure whether it’s a genuine or flip suggestion, but either way, they laugh.

“Knight Tai tried to teach me, but I was hopeless,” they say, and they find themself smiling.

“What she teach?”

When Boomer pulls their legs up into the familiar old pose, Leeadra hoots and demands, “What? _Why?_ ” and they’re off from there.

+

One of Boomer’s units was once part of a siege that left entire battalions cut off from resupply for the better part of a week. When medical supplies ran low, troopers pushed on and made the best of things. The medic didn’t have much training — he was no Dax, that’s for sure — and that’s how Boomer found themself with an infected finger that got worse for days before the hapless medic finally lanced and drained it.

Talking about what happened is like that. A sharp initial prick, followed by the release of pressure and the knowledge that someday, eventually, it’s going to feel different.

* * *

“I comm,” Leeadra says, finally, one cycle while the two of them are seated in the ship’s galley. “Left a message.”

Boomer has a datapad full of messages from prospective customers and has been tapping out responses with input from Leeadra on whether ey wants to take on these jobs. They slowly set down the ‘pad. 

Leeadra is watching them, head cocked. 

“I ... know,” Boomer says, with some wonder, as they fully think about it for the first time without something in their mind trying to shut them out of it. “We were all laid up in medical for a while but I got your message a couple weeks later. I, uh, spaced it before I could listen to the whole thing. And your comm code.”

Leeadra can be impenetrable when ey wants to be, but eir face is very easy to read in that moment.

“Not like that,” Boomer says. “I was all in on the Empire.” A loyal child of the Emperor; they remember believing it straight to their core. “Deep down, I think part of me still knew you couldn’t contact me. It wouldn’t be safe.”

“So — space.” Leeadra makes a small twirling gesture; the comm code and the message, Boomer assumes, spinning off into nothing. It’s a literal interpretation of what ‘spaced’ means but it’s also not wholly inaccurate.

Boomer nods. “Dax tried to reach out, too. He—” They catch themself and shoot a glance at Leeadra. 

Boomer genuinely doesn’t know whether Leeadra worked out that Dax was Force sensitive. They never asked. It wasn’t Boomer’s secret to tell. It still isn’t.

“After he got out, but before I understood what we’d done. I shut him down.”

Leeadra nods. “Not safe.” There’s something knowing in eir tone. Ey probably does know about Dax, Boomer thinks.

“Yeah.”

“Could find him now,” ey points out. 

“That’s not a good idea.”

“Think Dax isn’t safe with you, still?”

Boomer exhales, slowly. It’s less steady than they want it to be. They lift a hand and rub the back of their neck, mostly to fill time and space as they try to put it into words. 

“I’m not afraid of a lot.” They’re self-aware enough to know they lack the healthy fear that most people would carry in lethal situations. They’re calm in a crisis; steady in chaos. It was an enormous benefit in their life as a sergeant in the GAR, even if they’d been shouted at a few times in regards to their self-preservation instincts. “But—” They stop. 

Leeadra is still watching them across the table. Boomer thinks ey already has an idea of what they’re trying to say. It helps, somehow. 

“I could hurt you or Dax, or someone else. I still don’t know why we attacked the first time,” they say. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“Stop. Should be,” Leeadra says sharply. 

The thing is, Leeadra’s not entirely wrong. Boomer does so much better when there’s someone relying on them. They know that. The past few months by themself have proven that conclusively. They’re a disaster on their own.

They can already trace the shape of the ways they could make themself useful on the _Jiri Wayfarer_ — helping with Basic-language correspondence when Leeadra finds it tedious and annoying, providing relief in the cockpit on autopilot long-haul flights, offering the option of extra muscle to take on bigger jobs once their wound fully heals. It’s already getting better every day. 

But there’s one massive fear looming over everything Boomer does, like a black hole slowly beginning to draw in its neighboring star systems. 

“I couldn’t live with myself if it happened again.” 

It was impossible enough to live with it the first time. It still is. They can’t do it again. Against everything Boomer is telling it to do, their hand starts to shake on the table. 

Leeadra’s glance flicks down, then back up again. “Okay,” ey says, softer, though Boomer thinks it’s more of an ‘It’s okay’ statement than actual agreement. “Okay.”

Boomer pulls both hands into their lap. “I’m getting off at Sernpidal.”

“Don’t have to.” 

Boomer is fully aware this has been too much to bring to anyone’s doorstep, much less someone who can sense other people’s emotions, who they didn’t know all that well to begin with; who’s put in danger by Boomer’s sheer presence.

Leeadra’s eyes narrow, either at Boomer’s expression or at the feeling that’s washing over them. “ _No_ ,” ey says immediately, sharper this time, without waiting for a verbal response. “ _Don’t_ have to. Can stay. My ship, I say.”

“I appreciate everything you’ve done,” Boomer says firmly, “and I’m leaving at Sernpidal.”

There’s a silent stalemate across the galley table for a long moment before a proximity bell softly chirps, echoing down the corridor from the cockpit. Leeadra says darkly, “We talk, later,” with a finger point, and goes to check the alarm.

* * *

Threats aside, Leeadra doesn’t bring up the topic of Boomer leaving again. 

Boomer doesn’t either. They’re not looking forward to departing the _Jiri Wayfarer_. They may feel like a shell of themself but they’re _themself_. That’s space that Leeadra gave them — that they’re always going to be grateful for. Staying onboard is no way to repay that kindness. 

Maybe, given a little more time on their own first, they could try to track down Bash and Target, get in touch with Dax. Maybe Boomer could check on them all.

For now, Boomer sets about doing everything they can to be helpful. With Leeadra’s blessing, they reorganize the crates in the cargo hold, update the _Jiri Wayfarer_ ’s ads on a couple of servers, and triple-check the forms for merchant trading on Sernpidal. They start to remember how much they enjoy this kind of work.

Leeadra has been giving them space over the last few days, as they draw to within a few hours of Sernpidal, so Boomer stops short when they round the corner into the cargo bay and find Leeadra standing there on a practice mat, clearly waiting for them.

“How’s side?” Leeadra asks.

“Much better, thanks.”

“Good. Gonna touch. Okay?” Leeadra extends a hand, palm up, in an obvious invitation.

Boomer has no idea where this is going but they obediently step forward. “Okay,” they say, reaching out and taking the offered hand.

Leeadra grips their hand, pivots, yanks, and flips Boomer across eir hip. 

There’s a dizzying split second where Boomer is airborne, and then they hit the mat on their back, knocking the wind out of them. Before they can even react, Leeadra uses Boomer’s superior weight against them again and has them flat on their face with their arm twisted up behind their back and the tip of something pointy pressed just beneath their carotid artery. 

“Know you’re scared,” Leeadra says, “but _I can protect me_.” 

While the element of surprise was on Leeadra’s side and it was a neatly-done flip, Boomer’s legs and right arm are all still free. But Boomer doesn’t want to hook an arm around Leeadra’s neck and drag em down the way they know they could. All they really want is for Leeadra to let them up, and maybe to teach em a more effective way of pinning someone in case ey ever tries to pull this on an actual enemy.

So instead of letting the what-if-I-hurt-em panic take them over, they lie there and wheeze, “The next time you ask if you can touch me, I might say no.”

“Missing out,” says Leeadra, preening, and then ey climbs off of Boomer and steps back.

“Shavit, you’re strong,” Boomer groans into the mat, and Leeadra laughs. 

Baby steps, Boomer thinks again.

* * *

By unspoken agreement, neither of them talks about Boomer’s plans after Sernpidal. When the _Jiri Wayfarer_ lands, Boomer slaps an adhesive bandage over the half of their eyebrow that never grew back after they got too close to a detonite explosion a few years back, and lifts crates and three packaged paintings into a rented gravlifter. They lean back comfortably against another stack of crates to wait in the wings as Leeadra inspects the payment from the art dealer who’s drooling over his new pieces. It all goes off without a hitch.

Leeadra tosses Boomer a small sack of credit chips, afterward, and says, “Ten percent. Go see stuff,” and unceremoniously boots them off the ship.

Boomer can work with unambiguous orders.

+

Sernpidal’s orbit is never far from the Julevian system’s sun, and the planet feels like it. The sun beats down with incredible heat — on their way in, the _Jiri Wayfarer_ passed over klicks and klicks of desert that looked uninhabitable, shimmering heat waves visible even from a freighter rocketing along on sublight engines above it all. The city where Leeadra’s contact is based was built into the sides of a ravine slashed deep into the surface of the planet. From the bottom of the ravine, the rock walls stretch high into the distance, higher than some skyscrapers Boomer has seen on other planets. 

Boomer strolls through one of the lowest levels of the city, down deep enough that the heat of the day is a thing of the past and the locals have draped strings of small, soft orange lights across every available surface in order to light the dim streets. The city is a riot of thousands of years of construction layered on top of each other — buildings and alleys and doors all carved straight out of the rock. 

A thick network of bridges allows Sernpidalians to cross from one side of the gorge to the other. People bustle from one bridge to the next with pink glowlanterns in hand in the cool, damp air. They call out to each other in a cheerful-sounding guttural language. The Sernpidalians themselves are easy enough to spot — they’re a humanoid race with red eyes, white hair, and pale skin, and they tend to favor striped robes with enormous hoods. But Boomer hasn’t ventured far from the spaceport so there’s plenty of Basic being spoken, too, by people of all shapes, sizes, and levels of facial proboscis. 

Boomer spends a while leaning on a low rock wall, looking out across the massive gorge. They watch pink lights bob across the bridges crossing the ravine as far as the eye can see.

This level’s so far down that it might as well be another underground city, but it’s as far from the city-world of Taris as can be. Everything’s open. There’s a regular breeze even at this depth. Every once in a while a flitter rises up the side of the gorge, dodging bridges and dangling cables as the pilot lifts it toward the barely-visible thin strip of open air far overhead.

Boomer makes their way through the level on foot. Musicians are playing with acoustics on a stage scooped out of the rock wall. There are robes hanging on lines outside of homes, staked directly in front of fissures in the gorge walls so the laundry sways in the breeze. The strings of orange lights lining the narrow streets give way to yellow and then blue — they clearly mean something, even if Boomer has no idea.

They find an entire bridge that’s nothing but market stalls; the kind of place they’ve always been fascinated by. It’s packed to the gills with pedestrians shopping, chattering to each other with arms full of bags and produce. Shopkeepers have rigged up ingenious solutions for displaying wares in a narrow space choked by foot traffic. Some of the stalls look permanent, like they’ve been up in one position and slowly added to for decades.

Boomer wanders. They try some kind of delicious spicy-sour grilled fruit on a skewer and buy a few to bring back to the _Jiri Wayfarer_. They find a pair of worn-in, sturdy soft boots and sell the old ones right off their feet. They buy trousers that will actually fit and a few practical tunics. They stop in a crowd to watch an artist create increasingly elaborate scenes by layering the colored condensation trails of something that looks like a modified hydrospanner. They listen to drummers, watch children dart through the crowds, drift from booth to booth with growing pleasure.

There are bright flowers growing in bottles so tiny that at first Boomer thinks the flowers must be fake, but from the thick floral scent, they’re real. There’s a couple selling more flavors and varieties of caf than Boomer would have believed existed in the entire galaxy. A booth full of nothing but wooden utensils carved with incredibly intricate three-dimensional designs, seascapes and gardens and unfamiliar animals that Dax would probably recognize. A vendor with a high, clear singing voice advertises their spiced meat patties in a cheerful tune as they accept credits and dish out containers.

Boomer pauses at a table lined with small brightly-colored pots and brushes. Sernpidalians don’t have hair so it takes a minute to explain what Boomer’s looking for, but once the shopkeeper understands, they immediately brighten and produce a couple of thin sticks that look like styluses. The two of them test colors on the back of Boomer’s hand and together they decide on the shade that’s going to match their eyebrows, so they can stop slapping an itchy adhesive bandage above their eye every time they go planetside.

The shopkeeper tries to talk them into buying some kind of gold, shimmery paste, afterward. Boomer smiles and easily begs off, but the revelation hits like a thunderbolt as they’re walking away: they could if they wanted to. 

They don’t feel driven to; makeup has never been something they're interested in, and it still isn't. But it's a reminder there’s no longer a military dress code to — well, at least nominally, in the case of the Snekfruits — adhere to.

The losses the galaxy has suffered are so cataclysmic that they can’t even be fully grasped. It’s been impossible to think about losing the GAR as anything other than a loss — which has, in turn, been wrenching in and of itself, given that Boomer’s always been a glass-half-full person. They roll with the punches. Cheerfully going with the flow wasn’t feasible after everything that’s happened and it’s made them feel unsteady. Lost. 

Boomer has been avoiding figuring out what the hell to do. The absence and the guilt are all-consuming. They didn’t have the first idea of what a future could look like. The GAR is all they’ve ever known. They were literally made for it. It never occurred to them that there could be a galaxy where they weren’t a soldier. They wouldn't have wanted that galaxy. 

Boomer pulls out of the busy foot traffic and pauses in a gap between two booths. They lean on the bridge railing and look out across the ravine again. The pink glowlamps are still bobbing along across every one of the nearest bridges, as the planet’s day slowly shifts to night and what little light filters down from the surface grows darker. Every pink light crossing a bridge is a person. An individual, with hopes and dreams and a life of their own.

New possibilities aren’t worth what’s been lost. Nothing could be. But Boomer has been so single-mindedly focused on sheer survival that this is the first time they’ve been able to comprehend that there are options open to them now that never would have even occurred to them before. 

One of the booths they’re standing next to is selling an artist’s work — canvases, mostly landscapes in wild color combinations that look like they’re probably a figment of the artist’s imagination more so than a reflection of reality. Boomer could buy one. They could find a long-term home base and hang it up there, if that’s what they wanted, and fill a space that belonged to them with things they like. 

They always shipped out wherever they were ordered. They never had substantive personal effects or funds of their own, or choices. 

As overwhelming and undeserved as they are, there are literal worlds of new possibilities open.

“Can I interest you in a unique piece of art, friend?” asks the stall’s owner, and Boomer actually thinks about it.

+

When Boomer returns to the _Jiri Wayfarer_ ’s docking slip, bag of purchases over their shoulder, they find Leeadra in an expansive, celebratory mood.

“What you buy? Fun?” Leeadra asks. Ey only laughs a little bit when Boomer sucks in a sharp breath as they rip the bandage off their eyebrow, which Boomer appreciates.

“Trousers, tunics, boots,” they say, waving a welcoming hand at the shopping bag they’d set down on the galley table. They’re preoccupied by leaning over the reflective surface of one of Leeadra’s mugs and making an attempt at penciling in their missing eyebrow.

Leeadra, seated at the table behind Boomer and audibly going through the bag, makes a rude noise. “Boring.” 

“I could go naked instead,” Boomer points out.

“Better,” says Leeadra cheerfully, and then ey makes an inquisitive noise and there’s a soft thump. Boomer turns around. Leeadra has pulled out the two unfamiliar fruits that Boomer bought from a grocer. One is covered in a thick, gray spiky skin with splashes of pink and orange. The other is a delicate little oval that fits easily in the palm of Leeadra’s hand. Its skin is translucent and it smells sharp and acidic. The scent had made Boomer’s mouth water, in the market.

“Okay, more fun,” Leeadra says, approving, as ey studies the fruits. 

“I figured we can try them later. There’s a container of grilled fruit in there, too.” Boomer tilts the mug to check that they’ve painted an eyebrow shape that at least sort of matches their real one. Their hair is choppy, with enough growth now that it’s not obviously the regulation Imperial stormtrooper haircut, and the beard still shadows their jaw and chin. It’ll do, for a half-hearted disguise. 

In the mug’s mottled reflection, they can see Leeadra watching them. “Look very pretty.” Leeadra is definitely gently mocking them. “Come on, cantina,” ey wheedles as ey rises from eir chair. “Finish a good job today, get drinks.”

It can’t hurt. Not more than anything Boomer’s already done, anyway.

“Sure,” they say.

+

In the spaceport cantina, Boomer very quickly realizes that Leeadra is hunting for eir next job. “Is that how you always do this?” they ask, bemused. “Drinking in tapcafes and winking at people?”

Leeadra, who has just delivered a truly outrageous wink to a Bothan sitting by the bar, says, “Worked on clones.”

Ey’s not wrong. From the moment that the squad met Leeadra in another cantina like this one, Boomer had been drawn to em. The whole squad had liked Leeadra; been able to tell ey was a better bet than the drunk human they'd initially hired as their captain for the expedition to the Unknown Regions.

Still obviously watching the Bothan, Leeadra rises from the table ey has been sharing with Boomer. “Stay here, I be back.”

Leeadra’s not gone more than five minutes before ey comes hurrying back all at once. “Okay, got a lead, she’s coming; look scare.”

“You want me to look threatening?” 

Leeadra bobs eir head with a stern stare, so Boomer puts on their best serious expression.

Leeadra swears in Ryl. “Why so bad!!”

“I’m used to having a helmet,” Boomer points out.

Leeadra makes an exasperated noise somewhere deep in eir throat. “Just look big, no face,” ey hisses, and then ey brightens up and smiles at the Bothan woman approaching their table.

Boomer is treated to a masterpiece showing of charisma as Leeadra charms the prospective client without any apparent effort. When ey dismissively introduces Boomer as, “Carry things,” the struggle not to laugh is real, and Boomer has to take a long drink of their ale to compose themself. They think they’ve laughed more in the last week than in the last ten months combined.

When the client leaves, contract signed and cargo pick-up arranged for the morning, Leeadra kicks back and looks tremendously smug. 

“I bow before the master,” Boomer says.

“Obviously,” says Leeadra, still clearly very pleased with emself.

The two of them look at each other. 

Boomer’s about to start an easy conversation about the band — there’s some truly excellent people-watching to be had in this place — when Leeadra huffs and sits forward. “So.” Ey eyes Boomer from across the table. “What you gonna do?”

“No idea.” Boomer salutes em with their mug.

“No idea??” ey demands.

“I’ve been pretty focused on getting out of the Core. I’m out now, so… I’ll figure something out.”

Leeadra ignores them. “What you _wanna_ do?”

Struts gave Boomer a truly appalled stare, last year, when they said they’d never given a second thought to what their life would be after the war was over, and he was right. Boomer should have been thinking about it. Life didn’t end with the GAR, as much as it’s felt like it did.

“I’ve never really thought about it,” Boomer admits again.

“Oof,” says Leeadra, definitely judging but also companionable.

“Oof,” Boomer agrees ruefully, and the two of them clink their mugs.

+

“You’re like a, a,” says Leeadra, several hours later, and then ey says a word that Boomer absolutely cannot understand, with an expansive hand gesture and a convulsive wiggle of eir headtails. 

“Was that an insult?” Boomer asks, bemused.

Leeadra throws eir head back and makes an exasperated rude noise at the ceiling. Ey has had several drinks and eir face has gone a slightly darker shade of blue. “Basic shavit language,” ey complains. “They … hunt, packs, together. Very danger.”

From the sinuous motion of their hand, Boomer thinks maybe fish, maybe some kind of aquatic predator. 

“One goes alone, they’re lost. Swim in circles.”

Swimming in circles sounds about right. Boomer laughs and rests their chin in their hand, listening.

“But learn alone,” Leeadra says. “Get better at being alone. Not always bad at.”

“Are you making this up?”

Leeadra makes a rude-sounding watery noise — Boomer thinks they may have just been cursed out in Nautolan — and then pulls out eir datapad. Ey pokes at it for a minute, then lifts the ‘pad and projects a rotating three-dimensional image of a truly horrible creature. 

Leeadra stabs a finger through its gaping, tooth-filled maw. “Get bigger, better,” ey insists. “Learn and hunt alone okay. Get danger again.”

If Boomer had the time, if they weren't going to leave, if they could trust the steadiness of their hands, they’d knit Leeadra so many scarves.

Leeadra is drunkenly studying the three-dimensional image rotating above eir datapad. “Three hundred teeth, though,” ey says. Ey shoots Boomer’s mouth an assessing look. “So maybe not you.”

Boomer cracks up.

+

In the middle of a tipsy diatribe on the tyranny of licensing regulations for cargo haulers, Leeadra stops short and goes utterly still. Boomer’s head snaps up and they start to say, “What’s—”

There’s a burst of blaster pistol fire from three or four meters away. The cantina erupts with shouting and crashes. In one fluid move, Boomer shoves their table over and pulls Leeadra down behind it. There are bottles rolling on the floor — Boomer grabs one by the neck, smashes it off the edge of the overturned table, and waits.

The bartender is yelling at someone. There’s one final shot, this one the high-pitched whine of a heavy blaster set to stun, followed immediately by the thump of a body hitting the ground.

Boomer glances over the top of the table. The bartender’s standing behind the bar with a military-grade blaster rifle in hand. There’s a downed figure splayed across a broken table, their companions arrayed around with their hands all in the air. Patrons are starting to pick themselves back up again.

“Okay,” says Leeadra softly. “Boomer.”

Boomer realizes they’re crouched together with Leeadra tucked in close. Boomer has a protective hand on eir shoulder, holding em down. 

Boomer immediately lifts up their hand. “Shavit, sorry,” they say.

“Okay.” Leeadra sits up and turns to face them, and pauses. Taking eir time, telegraphing the move so Boomer could pull back if they wanted to, Leeadra reaches out to cup the back of their neck in one hand. 

Boomer shuts their eyes and lets em.

Leeadra speaks slowly, obviously picking and choosing eir words with great care. “Even if you’re having bad times, you want to help, protect.” Eir hand is cool and eir grip is strong. “Stay if you want. I like having you.”

The fear is never going to go away. Boomer knows that. But this marks several times in the last few days that Leeadra has been in their space and they’ve felt nothing but horror at the thought of potentially hurting em. They’re still themself.

They can’t let their guard down. But maybe leaving is overkill. Maybe they can keep a careful distance. Maybe they can figure out how to be just Boomer, instead of Sergeant CT-2726 or whoever the hell the mess they’ve been over the last few months has been. And they know they should trust Leeadra to know what ey’s comfortable with.

The thing is: they don’t actually want to leave.

“I like having you, too,” Boomer says, simultaneously heartfelt about their connection with Leeadra and the _Jiri Wayfarer_ , and also a double entendre because they know Leeadra will appreciate it. 

Leeadra gives a delighted crack of laughter and gently shakes Boomer back and forth by the scruff of the neck, still beaming at them. “We try. Okay? Doesn’t work, then you go. Easy.”

“Easy,” repeats Boomer, and Leeadra nods firmly.

There’s movement overhead, and Boomer instinctively reacts; Leeadra moves all at once, too. 

Their server, peering over the top of the overturned table, freezes at finding himself facing a blaster barrel and a broken bottle.

“I’ll just … come back later,” he says weakly, and he immediately vanishes again. 

“Gonna piss himself,” Leeadra says wisely, after a minute, and Boomer starts to laugh.

* * *

Leeadra’s nowhere to be found in the morning — not especially surprising, after the way ey had weaved eir way back from the cantina last night. Boomer nursed two ales all night long; Leeadra will definitely be the worse for wear of the pair of them.

Boomer leaves a note in the galley and slips off the _Jiri Wayfarer_ into the dawn. 

When they get back, the sun has fully risen overhead. The spaceport is located on a high enough level that the light is actually visible and they can feel the day’s heat already starting to rise. They pause in a shaft of sunlight on the spaceport floor and shut their eyes, face turned up to the sun’s warmth.

“Boomer!” a familiar voice shouts. Boomer opens their eyes and finds Leeadra barreling down the _Jiri Wayfarer_ ’s ramp and making a beeline for them. There’s a certain sense of déjà vu. 

Leeadra stops directly in front of them. “Thought you leave,” ey accuses.

“I left a note,” Boomer tries, but Leeadra’s past it already.

“What's so important?” ey asks, stabbing a finger at the flimsi-wrapped package tucked under Boomer’s arm.

Boomer couldn’t stop thinking about one particular market stall when they woke up in their silent, still, empty quarters this morning. They unwrap the package and offer it to Leeadra. 

Leeadra puts out eir hands to hold the painting. Ey studies it for a long moment. Boomer doesn’t know what ey’s seeing in it. 

It was the brightest, most colorful painting the artist showed them — a teal desert dotted with fantastical magenta plants and bordered by a glittering purple sea. The sky overhead is scudded with smears of pastel colors, stars showing through the clouds here and there. 

Finally, Leeadra looks up. “For bunk?” 

“Yeah.”

There’s something soft in eir expression now, Boomer thinks. Boomer’s getting better at reading em. “It’s nice.”

“I thought so.”

Leeadra carefully passes the painting back into their hands. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah,” says Boomer, and they are.


	3. Epilogue

The _Jiri Wayfarer_ darts from job to job on the edge of the Outer Rim and in Wild Space, shuttling cargo and passengers and running messages too sensitive to be entrusted to the Holonet. 

There are stops on half-abandoned moons, hyperlane waystations, and planets covered in blue marshes, dormant volcanoes, and wondrous biophosphorescent trees that Boomer can’t get enough of. 

Over long weeks in space, Boomer shifts cargo and organizes messages and permits. They start knitting again and periodically get thrown out of the galley for their unholy experiments with ration packs. They work out in the cargo bay and sit in the copilot’s chair in the cockpit to read melodramatic holonovels. 

The ship waits for delayed passengers on a world where Leeadra has less than complimentary things to say about the shallowness of the seas but spends two straight days disappearing into the surf for hours at a time. Boomer swims, too, until their fingers and toes start to prune, and then they retreat to the floating platform to stretch out to dry in the warm sun. When they start to feel like they’re baking, they dive back into the cool buoyant water again. Leeadra resurfaces every once in a while with reports of what ey has found on the seabed. By the time the passengers finally arrive, Boomer understands the appeal of beaches and vacations — two phenomena that were always purely theoretical to them, before.

Boomer picks up souvenirs across the galaxy. Their quarters slowly grow into a riot of color and patterns; seashells and little statues and posters and trinkets. It will always be lonely and strange to bunk alone, but over time, they get used to falling asleep with only the sound of the engines for white noise.

They start carrying a blaster again — never on the ship. They draw their weapon twice; they fire it once, taking down a prospective robber in a gang that sorely misjudged its targets. Boomer’s fine with that.

Even once they shave their beard, Boomer is never recognized to the point where they notice someone’s reaction. The closest it comes is, in a space station landing bay above G’rho, a client who squints and asks, “Do I know you from somewhere?”

“Them? Nah,” says Leeadra without looking up from the contract ey’s going over, and Boomer shrugs expansively.

The client looks at them — the cheerful first mate of a Nautolan trading ship, perched cross-legged on a crate and wearing a loudly patterned homemade sweater with their growing hair pulled back in a tiny, stubby tail — and also shrugs, and goes back to haggling with Leeadra.

* * *

“How’s hyperspace?” Leeadra asks. Ey is sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, watching Boomer like a dragonhawk. 

“You input the destination and have the computer calculate the jump,” Boomer recites, fitting words to action. They ignore the proximity alert that blares from the _Jiri Wayfarer_ ’s navcomputer, warning that the ship is currently docked. This is a lesson, not a hands-on demonstration. “Pull up a star chart to check the route.”

“No black holes,” Leeadra warns.

“No black holes,” Boomer confirms, though they know there aren’t always charts for the space the ship flies in. Leeadra has mostly been taking jobs in the Outer Rim and a few on the edge of Wild Space, since Boomer came on board, but they think ey will want to start heading out deeper again soon. 

Especially in the Unknown Regions, Leeadra will do all the flying, but these lessons are a precaution — break transparisteel in case of emergency, if Leeadra’s somehow unavailable or incapacitated. The two of them have already gone through basic maneuvers for repulsorlifts and sublight engines; docking, landing, takeoff, setting the autopilot. 

Lightspeed jumps are the most complicated, so Leeadra has saved this lesson for last. They’re talking through it while docked in the freighter bay of an enormous beast of a transport ship, now being used for less-than-legal merchant trading, at an anonymous rendezvous point in deep space. 

The _Jiri Wayfarer_ is parked in front of the magcon field that holds in the ship’s atmosphere and separates the hangar bay from the vacuum of space. There’s a faint blue shimmer from time to time, but otherwise it’s hard to see that there’s actually anything separating the ship from the stars beyond it.

The ship’s computer chirps with the notification of a safe route to Kalee. Boomer checks it against the star chart for the system, then looks to Leeadra for confirmation it’s correct.

“That’s it; lever,” ey says.

Boomer’s body reacts to the confident command in Leeadra’s voice before they can even think about it. Their fingers brush the hyperdrive lever.

Even as Leeadra is shouting, “ _No!_ ” and lunging, Boomer catches up to what they’re doing and whips their hand back. 

Leeadra is already shoving them out of the pilot’s seat. Once Boomer’s out of the way, Leeadra rockets into the chair.

As eir hands fly across the controls, Leeadra demands, “What you do??”

Boomer sags against the bulkhead, standing behind eir seat. “It, uh, felt like an order.”

“You can’t say no?!”

“It’s hard to,” they say, and Leeadra pauses, then, and then keys in one final command. The proximity alert cuts off, leaving the cockpit in silence. 

Leeadra turns around and looks at them. 

Boomer scrubs a hand over their face. Some days, they start to feel like themself again. Others, they find themself apologizing repeatedly. “Sorry. Hell.”

Leeadra watches them for another couple of seconds, headtails moving in a pattern that Boomer doesn’t understand yet, then says, “Will be more careful, what I say. And you don’t have to do. Can say no.”

“I know,” says Boomer, and they do. They just don’t normally have to say no to Leeadra. Ey has good ideas. Boomer _likes_ eir orders. They could use somebody telling them what to do, still, sometimes.

Other than when instinct almost results in them tearing the _Jiri Wayfarer_ apart with a jump to lightspeed from inside the belly of a starship, anyway. 

“Okay. We go again,” Leeadra says. Eir big black eyes narrow slightly and ey points at the co-pilot’s chair, where Boomer won’t have navigational power unless it’s routed in by Leeadra. “Over there.”

Boomer smiles, small. They try again.

* * *

Boomer starts to follow grav-ball, and they catch their first game in-person on a space station on the edge of Wild Space, surrounded by the frenetic energy of hundreds of screaming fans. They’re not sure they’ve ever laughed so much in their life.

Leeadra throws them off the ship for a few days on Lorrd while ey has other business to attend to. The first morning Boomer wakes up in a Lorrd City hotel with nowhere they have to be and nothing in particular to do is disconcerting, but they ask the hotel bartender for recommendations. They visit a museum for the first time in their life. They eat at cafes and completely fail to comprehend the Lorrdians’ impressive, subtle kinetic communication of body posture, gestures, and facial expressions — thankfully, the Lorrdians all speak Basic, too. They spend an afternoon sitting in the grass at a beautifully-landscaped park. They’d still rather keep themself busy, all in all, but having the option to figure out what they want to do — they like that.

They spend three hours wandering a tiny craftworks shop on a nameless planet orbiting Helska. It’s a warren of more kinds and colors of yarn than Boomer ever knew existed in the galaxy. The owner perches on his countertop and the two of them talk about stitches, about needles, about music (Boomer’s never listened to much of it, but they’re not opposed) and tattoos.

It’s the little things.

* * *

When the first tentative brush against their mind comes, Boomer sleepily thinks it’s part of their dream about a parade and a waterfall full of dancing purple mynocks. Then it comes again, and they sit bolt upright.

“I’m here,” they say, to their empty quarters.

Boomer once spent weeks meditating with Knight Tai to get better at responding to this kind of communication. They were never skilled at it — they apparently gave her headaches with the volume of their responses — but as they tumble out of their bunk, they draw on what she taught them.

Boomer fires back a barrage of thoughts of Leeadra and the _Jiri Wayfarer_ as they throw on the first pair of trousers they can find. They cap it off with: COMM, with as much force as they can. 

They step out of their quarters and go to the cockpit, where Leeadra keeps eir comm equipment. It’s a down cycle and the ship’s lights are dim to conserve energy, Leeadra nowhere to be found. 

Boomer throws themself into the pilot’s seat, but the comm unit is still dark. They pull up the ship’s comm code and then they think it as hard as they can.

Knight Tai always told them they didn’t have to say things out loud to communicate them this way (they think she preferred if they didn’t), but it still feels more natural. And more than anything, they want to talk to their brother. 

"Dax," Boomer says, and they say the comm code aloud.

The familiar presence projects something that feels very much like HANG ON.

The unit lights up with an incoming call. Boomer throws the switch.

“Hi,” says Dax’s voice. 

Boomer breaks into an enormous smile.

+

Eventually, there are footsteps in the corridor. Boomer glances back over their shoulder, and Leeadra steps into the cockpit and curls up in the co-pilot’s chair. They both sit in silence until Leeadra says, “Careful; leaking.”

Boomer thinks ey’s joking, though sometimes it’s still a little hard to tell, with Leeadra. They laugh wetly and swipe at their eyes with the back of their hand. “I’ll, uh, try to plug those leaks.”

“Is okay,” says Leeadra. “Jedi?” Ey definitely heard some of Boomer’s conversation with Dax from eir bunk, whether the words were audible or ey was struck by a wall of emotion.

“She’s alive,” says Boomer. 

It’s impossible to believe that those words just came out of their mouth; that it’s the truth. They hang in the silence. 

The relief is so all-encompassing and overwhelming that it can’t be real. It’s too enormous to see the full shape of it; Boomer's hands start to shake when they try. Their heart is still trying to pound out of their chest. Knight Tai is alive. Dax is wandering the galaxy with his Ranger boyfriend, searching for Force-sensitive kids. Target is settling in on a new planet, Dax had reported. Bash is apparently being vague about whatever the hell it is that he's doing, but he's alive.

“Dax, Target, and Bash, too; they're okay. There was a bio-chip implanted in our brains. We didn’t want to kill her. We—” Boomer barks a hoarse, disbelieving laugh. “We _didn’t_ kill her. She faked her death. Knocked most of us out. Mind-whammied Bash.” 

Boomer has carried the heavy incontrovertible weight of Knight Tai’s death for so long now that it’s difficult to wrap their head around. Dash upended the entire universe in the space of one sentence. But Dax promised. He has spoken with Bash about what really happened, because Bash was able to briefly fight off whatever was happening to them and he was himself when Knight Tai left and he _remembers_ it now. Dax has seen Knight Tai through the Force, too, and recently. She’s alive.

She’s alive.

“Cog?” Leeadra asks.

Boomer had immediately asked the same question. They shake their head.

Leeadra shifts eir weight in eir seat. Ey wants to offer to reach out, Boomer thinks. Ey’s a tactile person, like Boomer is too. But instead, Leeadra sits tight, and says, “Tell.”

+

“Bio-chip,” Leeadra says, later. Ey is still curled up in the co-pilot’s seat while Boomer’s in the pilot’s chair with their arms folded and one ankle crossed over the other, feet propped up on an empty section of the control panel.

“Like a restraining bolt,” Boomer says. They’re exhausted down to their bones. They know they should put their feet down, but it’s comfortable. They must really look like shavit for Leeadra not to have swatted at their feet yet. “Like we were droids.”

“Never meet a droid I’d kark,” says Leeadra, and Boomer can’t help but crack a startled, tired laugh. Leeadra’s ability to matter-of-factly flirt and call back to their history together while still respecting the boundaries Boomer has set is unparalleled.

“Chip, your brain. Doesn’t work?” Leeadra asks.

“I told Dax what happened and he thinks it got fried by an ion cannon blast in the training exercise I was in just before I deserted,” Boomer says. “He sent contact info for a surgeon.”

“Get it out?”

“Yeah,” says Boomer. “I’ll figure something out.” 

They need it out. They know they can’t actually feel it but it’s like a horror phantom itch, this thing that Boomer knows is there, now, and doesn’t belong; this thing that could take them again. 

They don’t exactly have a stockpile of credits lying around to cover the shuttle fares to cross half the galaxy and whatever fee the doctor might require, but they’ll make it work somehow. Dax had looked at them blankly when they asked about the procedure cost, then said he’d have to ask his partner, which had made Boomer smile. Same old Dax.

Dax had also first insisted that he would do the job himself, but Boomer refuses to be anywhere near him until the thing is out of their head. It’s dangerous enough that they’ve stayed with the _Jiri Wayfarer_. They’ll figure out some way to get to the surgeon. 

Leeadra shakes eir head. “Where?”

“A world in the Atrivis sector.”

Leeadra has turned to the co-pilot’s controls and is pulling up a star chart. “System?”

“Generis.”

Leeadra’s headtails flatten in what Boomer has come to recognize as a gesture of confirmation. In this case, Boomer thinks it’s an absent acknowledgement that Leeadra heard them, as ey studies the star chart and the ship’s comms console. “Ansion,” ey says, finally. “Message from contact, can get job. Generis not so far.”

Boomer remembers that message, and knows that, while it’s at least on the right side of the Outer Rim, Ansion isn’t _that_ close to Generis. A hot rush of gratitude swells in their chest and prickles at their eyes. They really don’t want to cry anymore tonight. It’s a long moment before they can say, “I thought this was a business, not a clone rescue operation.”

“Already rescue,” Leeadra says, waving them off. “Doesn’t count.”

* * *

“How do you feel?” is the first thing anyone asks Boomer, after the surgery. First an attendant and now the surgeon, perched at the edge of their bed checking their vitals.

Boomer takes stock. Relief that’s almost unbearable; an overwhelming tidal wave of it.

It’s gone. This tiny, violating thing that puppeted them and has been looming over their every waking moment, both before and after they knew what it actually was. It’s out of them.

“Fine,” they say, knowing their voice is rough. “Good.” A little stinging along their scalp, which is probably what the doctor is actually asking about, and lingering grogginess from the anesthetic. Nothing alarming.

Granted, in Boomer’s experience, their threshold for what they find alarming is often higher than medical professionals’. But in this particular case it’s only — the nothingness, now. The sudden, gaping absence of a mental weight that’s been suffocating them for months. 

“Good, good,” says the surgeon, and Boomer thinks she sees something in their face, because she leaves them alone soon after that.

+

Dax checks in, and mostly what sticks with Boomer is the sheer conviction with which he communicates: GOOD.

+

Leeadra shakes the tiny transparisteel specimen container. Inside, the deactivated chip rattles with a deceptively normal-sounding _tink tink_. “So small,” ey says.

It was the first thing Boomer thought, too, when the surgeon showed it to them and asked if they wanted to keep it. A gray and black rectangle smaller than their pinky nail changed the course of history. Thousands of Jedi slaughtered across the galaxy; tens of thousands of clones forced to murder against their will without even realizing. All triggered by these tiny dots of circuitry.

“Looks cook,” Leeadra says.

Boomer’s seated on the edge of the bed putting their boots on, but they’ve spent enough time looking at the chip already to know that Leeadra’s correct. It’s visibly fried at the edges. 

“Dax was probably right about the ion cannon blast,” they say. They make one last adjustment to their boot, then sit upright again.

Leeadra holds out eir hand. On instinct, Boomer hesitates — then stops. 

The chip is rattling around in a tiny jar. 

No one can make them do anything that they don’t actually want to do. 

They reach out and take Leeadra’s hand, and do most of the work hauling themself to their feet, because Leeadra is a Telian string bean of a person. Once up, Boomer wraps their arms around Leeadra, who says, “Oof,” and immediately steps in close and embraces them with an amount of force that suggests this is standing in for months’ worth of forestalled hugs.

“Thank you,” Boomer says into eir shoulder, Leeadra tucked close.

When Leeadra finally draws back, ey puts both hands on Boomer’s face to study them for a moment. Apparently satisfied with what ey’s seen, Leeadra reaches higher and ruffles the freshly-shaved patch on Boomer’s head, where their hair will grow back and hide the small scar. “You okay,” ey says.

It feels like a promise as much as it does a statement, delivered with absolute finality. 

GOOD, Dax had said.

They don’t have to be afraid of their own mind, their own hands, anymore.

Boomer nods, and Leeadra squeezes their ribs like a pleased bipedal dianoga again. As ey moves, the chip rattles in the little transparisteel container in eir hand, and Boomer finally, for the first time in a long time, knows exactly what to do.

* * *

The plains of Ansion are beautiful, waves of chartreuse grass sweeping across the hills. Purple-pink-blue clouds scud across the sky. The wind is constant and powerful, enough that there isn’t any vegetation taller than Boomer’s knees, but they’re tucked into a protected nook between two long-dormant, dried-up volcanic vents that probably pushed their way to the surface thousands of years ago. The ground between the vents is smooth black rock — nothing to burn. They’re hundreds of klicks from civilization. It’s perfect.

Leeadra has crouched beside Boomer, studying what they’re working on. “Overkill,” ey finally pronounces, with a definite undercurrent of: _you weirdo_ , and Boomer laughs. 

Leeadra lays a hand on Boomer’s shoulder and squeezes, then gives a final pat and gets up to start the long walk back to the ship through the grass. 

Sitting cross-legged on the black rocks, Boomer shapes the block of detonite purchased from a black market dealer on an unregistered transfer station above Ord Canfre. It’s the first time they’ve touched demolitions gear since their flight from the academy on Antar. It’s crude detonite, not the military-grade quality they’re used to, but it will do the job. 

If their hands will hold steady, anyway. 

They set down the detonite and rest their hands on their knees. They look out across the beautiful, desolate landscape surrounding them; glance over at the _Jiri Wayfarer_ , parked on a flat plain two and a half klicks away; watch a flying creature, a black speck in the distance, climb the soaring updrafts. They eat a protein bar. And then they try again.

It takes at least four times longer to shape and set the charge than it once would have; even slower, if they use their old mid-combat speed as the benchmark. But after a couple of rest breaks, they have low walls of detonite molded into a small circle, impressions of their gloved fingers still pressed into the explosive’s soft surface. They have the detonator set, pressed into the detonite, and wired to connect to their datapad. It’s time.

They reach into their jacket pocket and take out the little specimen jar. They shake the biochip out into their palm. It’s the first time they’ve touched it. It’s so light it’s like it’s not even in their hand.

Boomer puts the chip down in the middle of the circle of detonite. 

When they walk all the way back to the _Jiri Wayfarer_ , the freighter’s ramp is extended and the hatch is open. Boomer stands beside one of the ship’s landing gears and calls, “Fire in the hole,” up the ramp, to a wordless confirmation shout from Leeadra. 

Boomer triggers the charge on an inhale. The explosion erupts with a hot roar, blooming red, orange, and gold for a split second, molten rock and dirt flying. 

It does exactly what it was supposed to do. The wind position is perfect. The amount of explosive and the detonation were both just right. 

There’s the soft sound of boots on the ramp — Leeadra padding down to observe the rising trail of thick black smoke. Ey comes to a stop at Boomer’s side.

Boomer glances over at em, then back out at the planet’s new, small crater. The two of them stand shoulder to shoulder, the whipping wind carrying away the distant smoke.

“Better?” Leeadra finally asks.

Boomer grins.


End file.
